Shea blogged last week about State v. Terrell, a case in which the defendant's girlfriend saw on one of the defendant's USB drives an "image of [the girlfriend's] nine-year-old granddaughter sleeping without a shirt." She called the police, and an officer found additional images of "partially or fully nude minors" on the drive. The officer sought and obtained a search warrant that led to the discovery of child pornography. Shea's post, and the case itself, focused on the officer's initial warrantless search and whether it was justified under the private search doctrine. But the court's recitation of the facts reminded me of another common issue in child pornography cases: how much information about an image must an officer provide in order to establish probable cause that the image constitutes child pornography? What's child pornography, again? Under North Carolina law, child pornography is criminalized under the various sexual exploitation of a minor statutes located at G.S. 14-190.16 et seq. Those offenses generally cover creating, duplicating, distributing, and possessing representations of minors engaged in "sexual activity," which is defined in G.S. 14-190.13 to include most of the things one might expect, plus "[t]he lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person." What sorts of problems arise? In cases where a private person or a law enforcement officer views an image that belongs to a suspect, and an officer subsequently seeks a search warrant based on the image, questions might arise about whether the person in the image is a minor and about [...]
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