> [information] relevant to a possible civil lawsuit against the West Bend Police Department.”
No, the cops should not get to wipe data that could be used in court against them. Is this.... not obvious?
What ELSE did they wipe?
>the phone was rife with “numerous sexually explicit messages and images” sent to the victim as well as “significant personally identifying information about her” is not clear error. The record reveals that these conversations occurred over multiple apps on the phone and that Stathas also received explicit photos of the minor. The court did not clearly err by crediting the government’s assertion that “no procedure short of digitally wiping” the phone would eliminate all criminal or harmful material.
So a convicted child molester used multiple phone apps to contact his victim, and instead of going into every app on the phone to see if it had child sex abuse evidence the police just wiped his phone. The court said (more or less) "that's not unreasonable: cops have better things to do than hand wipe criminals' phones of criminal evidence".
Now is there a larger question here? Sure ... but lets not pretend police clearing evidence of child sex abuse from a phone (which the convicted child sex abuser claimed contained evidence ... for a lawsuit that very likely would never happen) is as simple as "police deleting evidence of their wrongdoing".
Imagine a world where housing is free, where anyone without can request a primary residence in a location of their choosing and -after twenty four hours- receive one free-of-charge that any member of today's working class would declare to be solidly of above-average quality.
In this world, would police who were tasked with destroying evidence of child molestation from the home of a convicted child molester be in error if they burned the molester's house down, rather than going through the trouble of locating just the documents, trinkets, & etc. that they were tasked with removing? [0]
I mean, what's the harm, right? The child molester can get a good house for nothing with a day's notice.
To make the analogy explicit: just because the child molester can re-use the phone doesn't make torching everything on that phone the correct thing to do. The fact that their mass destruction of that guy's property also destroyed evidence that was relevant to a civil lawsuit only makes things worse for them... maybe not legally, but definitely from a "That shit ain't right and shouldn't be happening!" standpoint.
I hope that the courts treat the relevant evidence as being deliberately destroyed, should the molester bring his civil suit.
> The court said (more or less) "that's not unreasonable: cops have better things to do than hand wipe criminals' phones of criminal evidence".
Yeah, this court is using bogus logic. If the cops don't have time for it, then they should be required to delegate to specialists. Mass destruction of one's papers and other personal effects in order to destroy a tiny slice of them is wildly out of line.
[0] The child molester lives alone, so the majority of the property in his house happens to be his... not that the torch squad bothered to check.
https://ij.org/press-release/homeowners-appeal-to-u-s-suprem...
The victims weren't even accused of a crime, let alone convicted, and the police destroyed their house without compensation. They lost in court, because of the important American principle that the police can do what they like and owe nothing to the citizenry.
_If_ this is an accurate summary of the ruling, that definitely doesn't agree with -say- the Third Amendment.
Do you happen to know whether the Supreme Court declined to hear the case?
That reminds me of the time -IIRC- Scalia asserted that it was A-OK for the cops to "happen" to kill a fleeing suspect by dropping a tree on his moving car, even if they expected that the falling tree would strike the car.
If I'm attributing the decision to the right guy, I'm sure he would have loved to have gotten a chance to exonerate all those ICE agents who've -collectively- gone on a murder spree here "recently".
We need our slave catchers and Pinkertons as immune as possible from accountability. How else will they protect the interests of capital?
After Reading the Article: "Well, given the circumstances, deserved."
Maybe don't engage/consume/manufacture CSAM and it won't be a problem.
That's the point of law. To come up with principles that you can follow consistently, regardless of your feelings in the situation.
Should the police wipe criminals phones? No.
Should the police wipe CSAM-adjacent data from phones to protect victims? Yes.
One is a consistent principal that is bad/cruel/overly broad. The other is a consistent principle that targets a specific harm.
Given how much of our lives happens on smartphones these days, willfully destroying personal data which is not in any way related to the crime seems like extrajudicial and unusual punishment to me, and not something the police should be able to do without an explicit court order.
I do think a court order should have been issued in this case. The offender's conduct was severe enough to earn him 15 years in prison, and the risk of continuing/future harm to the victim was substantial.
But then I thought, no, don't delete it.
Because then you can bust them for possessing CSAM again, just about as soon as you hand it over, if you've a suitably vindictive frame of mind, and you've no reason not to.
But then you have to *retain* the CSAM as evidence anyway.
I don't think wiping an offender's phone is justified in most cases even if it might hinder them in potential subsequent crimes, but it does seem justified in this case where the phone contains significant material harmful to the victim of a serious crime.
If the claim is that some of the material there evidences police abuses of some sort, you can’t really let the offender pick the stuff they feel supports their claim and wipe the stuff that might weaken it.
And if there’s criminal material mixed in with the other, non-offending data that the offender claims they need, it seems like you kind of need some kind of adjudication process on an item-by-item basis.
They’ve clearly worked out a way to manage custody, access, and review for the purposes of the initial prosecution. Let the offender fund it under the same terms until they either fish or cut bait. Maybe if their claim of police abuse works out, this might be among the costs the court could award.
After that, I think there's some reasonable level of effort that we should expect the government to have to make to only destroy what's illegal, but practically that might mean that other data gets destroyed as well. Maybe the owner can request specific things be saved or something like that; but it's likely to be something that needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
And also, yikes, don't actually want these type of horrific people doing this? It's difficult all around.
Or make it simpler, is an unlicensed firearm returned after the legal process? If not, who owns it?
Usually not, but sometimes under circumstances enumerated by law. Like this case.
Problem solved.
I want to ask two questions here.
If you believe the prison system can change people and make them better, consider how you would live your current life without access to all electronic devices. Do you still think a flat out ban is reasonable?
If you don't think the prison system can bring about actual change then what do you believe the alternative is?
I think my question boils down to this.
Would you be willing to spend a portion of your salary for the rest of your working life to support a pedophile? That is exactly what would happen if they were cut off from all electronic devices or imprisoned for life.
If somebody is stupid enough to let a pedo out out of jail, I don't want him to have access to the same tools he used previously to interact with these children. This is no different than when a drunk driver loses their drivers license.
I am completely willing to accept that some people might be rehabilitated in prison, but I am not willing to take the chance with pedophilia. Certain crimes I would be more lenient with, but one of the most heinous crimes is not something I feel comfortable releasing.
I would much rather pay to keep a pedo in jail then risk any child is hurt.
Edit: I would encourage anyone who's downvoting me to worry less about their own digital rights and spend some time thinking about what it would be like to have explicit pictures of yourself in the hands of someone who hurt you.
However if the ultimate goal is to make sure no CSAM or victim info is accidentally returned to the predator, the phone is ultimately going to have to be wiped. There are probably some data extraction companies that could make a pretty confident claim to have removed everything, but it'd be very difficult to verify.
I’m pretty interested in the related questions of backups, data stored in apps that can be restored, etc, but not enough to go looking for more info on this guys phone.