5th Circuit: 18-month delay does not render child porn evidence stale
United States v. David Allen, No. 09-50283 (5th Cir. Nov. 4, 2010)
A panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (Starrett, District Judge, sitting by designation, wrote the opinion) held that a search warrant issued 18 months after child pornography images were accessed on a peer-to-peer networking site by the defendant was not based on stale information:
[The] magistrate could have reasonably concluded that the pornographic images were still on the computer at Allen’s home at the time the warrant was issued . . . the computer’s ability to store images in digital form makes it an ideal repository for child pornography. Internet access permits a computer user to transport and download an image file to his own computer. Important to the staleness issue, the magistrate was advised that computer files or remnants of such files can be recovered months or even years after they have been downloaded onto a hard drive, deleted, or viewed via the internet.
The court cited United States v. Riccardi, 405 F.3d 852 (10th Cir. 2005) which allowed a a five-year-old Kinko’s receipt; United States v. Frechette, 583 F.3d 374 (6th Cir. 2009) which allowed a one month subscription to a child pornography site that was over a year old; and United States v. Lacy, 119 F.3d 742, 745 (9th Cir. 1997) which allowed 10 month old information.
COMMENTS
