Case Summaries: Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (May 2025)

This post summarizes published criminal law and related cases released by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals during May 2025. Cases of potential interest to state practitioners are summarized monthly. Previous summaries of Fourth Circuit cases are available here. Motion to compel information from foreign law enforcement agency was properly denied; motion to suppress also properly denied where search warrant affidavit established a strong likelihood of defendant’s involvement in child pornography offenses U.S. v. Dugan, 136 F.4th 162 (May 1, 2025). A foreign agency with whom the FBI had a relationship and who was known to give reliable information notified the FBI that a certain domestic IP address had visited a “dark web” website known to contain and disseminate child sexual abuse material. The IP address was traced to the defendant’s home, and an FBI agent obtained a search warrant for the residence. The affidavit in support of the search warrant detailed how the “dark web” site worked. Users of the website were required to post a certain number of megabytes of child sexual abuse material to the site to maintain an account. The website was only accessible via a TOR browser, which requires downloading specific software to use and makes tracking of users IP addresses more difficult. Because the addresses of dark web sites are usually complex and TOR software is required to access them, it is extremely difficult to accidentally access such sites. The affidavit further detailed that the foreign agency was a “friendly country” that operated an independent [...]