United States v. Justin Barrett Hill

Justin Hill conditionally pled guilty to possession of child pornography subject to his challenge to the admission of evidence that he contends was seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment. His appeal involves the validity of a warrant to search his computer and storage media for evidence that he possessed pornographic (i.e., lascivious) images of children. We must also decide whether it was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment for the police to take all of Hill’s computer storage media from his home (they did not find his computer) so they could conduct their search offsite in a police laboratory, rather than carrying out the search onsite and taking only whatever evidence of child pornography they might find. As we recently discussed in United States v. Adjani, 452 F.3d 1140 (9th Cir.2006), because computers typically contain so much information beyond the scope of the criminal investigation, computer-related searches can raise difficult Fourth Amendment issues different from those encountered when searching paper files. Judge Kozinski, sitting as the district court in this case, thoughtfully addressed some of these issues in a published opinion upholding the validity of the…