United States v. Seiver, No. 11-3716 (7th Cir. 2012)
Annotate this CaseDefendant pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography and sexual exploitation of a child, 18 U.S.C. 2252A(a)(5)(B), 2251(a), and was sentenced to 420 months, reserving the right to appeal the legality of the search of his computer. The warrant affidavit said that authorities had discovered that a pornographic video, which a 13- year-girl had made of herself and uploaded to the Internet, had been downloaded to a computer at defendant’s home and that images from that video had been uploaded from that computer to an image-sharing website. A Facebook message with a link to that website had been sent to the girl’s stepmother from the same computer. Authorities identified the computer’s Internet Protocol address as registered to the defendant. Defendant argued that the facts were stale and that there was no reason to believe that seven months after he had uploaded child pornography there would still be evidence of the crime on his computer. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. Staleness is highly relevant to the legality of a search for a perishable or consumable object, like cocaine, but rarely relevant to a computer file. Computers and computer equipment are “not the type of evidence that rapidly dissipates or degrades.”
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