My reaction from the title: "That's destruction of property, plain and simple."
After Reading the Article: "Well, given the circumstances, deserved."
Maybe don't engage/consume/manufacture CSAM and it won't be a problem.
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.
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.
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.