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Fourth Amendment Civil Suit for Deleting a Picture from the Plaintiff’s Camera

Posted on September 11, 2013July 1, 2025 by Dissent

Orin Kerr writes:

Here’s an oddball Fourth Amendment case involving an issue I have never seen litigated: How does the Fourth Amendment apply to deleting a picture from a digital camera? In Burch v. City of Florence, Ala., 913 F.Supp.2d 1221 (N.D.Ala. 2012), the police had received various complaints that the plaintiff was causing concern because he was taking pictures of lots of people and cars in town. He would apparently follow people and take lots of pictures of them, all without any apparent reason. A police officer who knew about the complaints spotted the plaintiff and pulled him over for a traffic violation. When the car was stopped, the officer saw the camera in the car. The officer grabbed the camera and started looking through its pictures. When the officer found a picture of the officer’s own license plate (of his personal car), the officer deleted the picture from the camera. The officer then let the plaintiff go. The plaintiff then filed a pro se civil suit under the Fourth Amendment, claiming that searching the camera and deleting the image violated his Fourth Amendment.

Read more on The Volokh Conspiracy.

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