Seventh Circuit Clarifies Application of Fourth Amendment to Searches of Computer Hard Drives

seventh-circuit51While working as a life guard instructor, Matthew Mann covertly installed a video camera in a locker room in order to take footage of women changing their clothes.  After the camera was discovered and turned over to the authorities, police executed a search warrant at Mann’s home for “video tapes, CD’s or other digital media, computers, and the contents of said computers, tapes, or other electronic media, to search for images of women in locker rooms or other private areas.”  In connection with the search, police seized computers and an external hard drive from Mann.  Police later ran forensic software on this equipment that revealed the presence of child pornography, which formed the basis of a federal prosecution.

The district court denied Mann’s motion to suppress the images found on his hard drives.  Mann then pled guilty, but preserved the right to litigate his Fourth Amendment claim on appeal.  In United States v. Mann (No. 08-3041) (Rovner, J.), the Seventh Circuit affirmed.  Although the scope of the warrant was limited by its terms to a search for “images of women in locker rooms or other private areas,” the court held that police did not exceed the scope of the warrant when they collected and viewed Mann’s collection of child pornography. 

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Seventh Circuit: Earlier Sentence Served in Juvenile Detention Facility Can Make Defendant a Career Offender

seventh circuitAfter pleading guilty in federal court to various drug-trafficking offenses, Isaiah Gregory received an eye-popping sentence of 327 months in prison — more than 27 years behind bars.  Driving this extraordinary sentence was the district court’s finding that Gregory was a “career offender” under the federal sentencing guidelines.  It was the career offender guideline that raised Gregory’s guidelines range from either 120-135 months (as he calculated it) or 121-151 months (as the government calculated it) to 262-327 months.   Thus, the career-offender finding likely added more than fourteen years to Gregory’s sentence.

Although the term “career offender” may conjure up images of a hardened criminal with a rap sheet down to your knees, the guidelines require only two prior felony convictions of either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense in order to trigger the career-offender sentence enhancement. 

Even at that, Gregory hardly seems the sort of defendant that the Sentencing Commission must have had in mind when it drafted the career-offender guideline.  In particular, one of his two qualifying convictions was a $30 robbery he committed when he was only fifteen (he is now in his mid-20’s) — a robbery for which he was sent, not to prison, but to a juvenile detention facility.  Although it is not clear that the conviction should have counted under the plain terms of the career-offender guideline, the Seventh Circuit nonetheless affirmed his sentence last week in United States v. Gregory (No. 09-2735). 

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Farewell to a Beloved Professor

danfreedI was saddened today to learn that my dear mentor, Professor Dan Freed of Yale Law School, is dying.  I wrote a post about Dan on this blog some time ago.  Although word has just been getting out today, tributes and farewell messages to Dan are already starting to pour into this website.  It is amazing to read what a profound influence he had on so many people.  One line particularly caught my eye, from Professor Frank Bowman of Missouri:

Most importantly, I want to say that there are innumerable “professors” in American graduate education, but there are only a bare handful of teachers. You are one.

How perfectly fitting a tribute for Dan Freed — the teacher’s teacher.

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