Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Fourth Amendment

Criminal Law

: Fourth Amendment

NY2: A college professor who had child porn on his college computer terminal had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the computer, even without showing school policy

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Defendant was a college professor found to have 13,000 images of child pornography on his college owned computer. There was a college wide upgrade of computers and all the files on his old hard drive were copied to the new one. Two years later, he complained to the IT department that the computer was not working right, and they came to check it out. They found the child porn, some dating back to five years before the upgrade, and reported it. Defense counsel never moved to suppress it, and this was not ineffective assistance because the defendant could not show a reasonable expectation of privacy in the college’s computer, even though it was used only by him. He called IT to look at it. (The record was silent on anything about the computer policy, but that doesn’t seem to matter...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on October 16, 2010 (boomark / email).