Orin Kerr writes:
“Yes,” says Judge Maurice Paul in United States v. Durdley, 2010 WL 916107 (N.D. Fla. 2010), handed down on March 11. I haven’t seen any cases quite like this, but I tend to think the decision is wrong. In this post, I wanted to explain the decision and then say why I find its reasoning rather unpersuasive.
Durdley was an emergency paramedic for the local county who was at work using a shared computer. When he was done using the shared computer, he forgot to take away the thumb drive had attached to one of the computer’s USB ports. Later on, a captain of the paramedic team named Johnson, was using the computer and saw the thumb drive attached. Johnson decided to see what was on the thumb drive, so he double-clicked on the “my computer” icon, double-clicked on the thumb drive icon to see the list of files, and then double-clicked on some files to see what they contained. Johnson found child pornography files on the thumb drive, leading to charges against Durdley.
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