The Eleventh Circuit handed down an interesting Fourth Amendment case last week, United States v. Mitchell.
The facts: The police suspected Mitchell of downloading child pornography, and they went to talk to him at his home. Mitchell candidly admitted to downloading child pornography. Mitchell then brought an officer to his computer, and officer asked if the computer had child pornography stored on it. Mitchell acknowledged that the computer contained child pornography, although he did not consent to allow the officers to search it. Given that the computer contained contraband, the officers decided to open up the computer and take the hard drive away.
The seized hard drive sat in the government’s lab for three weeks until the lead agent applied for and obtained a warrant to search it. (The agent was out of the office on training for two of those weeks, and he didn’t think he needed to be in a hurry.) An eventual search of the computer under the warrant yielded contraband images, leading to charges against Mitchell for downloading and possessing images of child pornography. When Mitchell’s motion to suppress the images found on the seized hard drive was denied, Mitchell pled guilty to the charges, conditional on his right to appeal the motion to the Eleventh Circuit.
Held, in a per curiam opinion (Birch, Barkett, Korman by designation): The conviction is vacated because the evidence found on the seized hard drive must be suppressed. The initial seizure was justified, but the police needed to obtain a warrant in a reasonable period of time to justify the continued detention and search. Three weeks was just too long under the circumstances of the case to wait given the sensitive nature of information stored on a computer:
Computers are relied upon heavily for personal and business use. Individuals may store personal letters, e-mails, financial information, passwords, family photos, and countless other items of a personal nature in electronic form on their computer hard drives. Thus, the detention of the hard drive for over three weeks before a warrant was sought constitutes a significant interference with Mitchell