Probable Cause and Child Pornography

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?

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