Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

Search warrants often play critical roles in many criminal cases, primarily because they are usually necessary in order to allow law enforcement officials to invade someone’s privacy in order to search for evidence. There are many principles that govern the legitimacy and use of search warrants, many of which have been discussed in previous blog articles. One in particular is the plain view doctrine, which basically holds thus: if the police have probable cause to search your home, they can seize any evidence of any crime that is in plain view. That is to say, if police are searching your home pursuant to a search warrant authorizing them to search for drugs and the police spot child pornography lying on the kitchen table, they can seize the pornography and arrest you for possessing it.

This doctrine, however, becomes more complicated when the evidence is not in plain view, but is instead contained on a computer that is in plain view. Can police search a computer sitting in plain view if they merely have a search to warrant authorizing a search of the home? The answer is no. Tennessee courts have held that police cannot search a computer pursuant to a search warrant unless that warrant establishes probable cause to search the computer itself. In a recent case that came before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, the Court found that suppression of evidence of child pornography found on a defendant’s computer was proper where law enforcement officials had searched the computer pursuant to a search warrant authorizing a search of the defendant’s home for drugs. The court reasoned that if the search warrant had established probable cause to believe that the defendant was trafficking in large enough amounts of drugs that records might be found on the computer, then the result may have been different. Since that proposition was not established by the search warrant, however, the search was illegal and the evidence was suppressed.

Search warrants can be of the utmost importance in many cases. An illegal search can lead to suppression of key evidence, allowing the defendant to obtain a not-guilty verdict or avoid trial altogether. Tennesseans who feel they have been subjected to an illegal search should contact a skilled criminal defense attorney who can assist them in suppressing any illegally seized evidence.

Source: (State v. Bearden, 35 TAM 15-26, 2/11/10, Nashville, Welles, 5 pages.)