United States v. Smith, No. 17-2446 (2d Cir. 2020)
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The Second Circuit affirmed defendant's conviction and sentence for six counts of unlawful possession of child pornography.
The court held that the police delayed unreasonably long in violation of the Fourth Amendment when they waited without good cause for 31 days to seek a search warrant after seizing defendant's tablet computer. However, the court held that the exclusionary rule does not apply because the police's unreasonable delay was due to isolated negligence and because an objectively reasonable police officer would not have known that the delay amounted to a violation of the Fourth Amendment in light of then-existing precedent. The court also held that defendant's 212 month sentence was not procedurally or substantively unreasonable in light of the large amount of child pornography that defendant possessed as well as his history of sexually abusing children.
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