hmm, what did they wipe?
> [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?
> [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?