Police Blotter: Can Circuit City techs legally peruse your files?

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You are wrong

Reporting what one sees and doing an illegal search are two entirely different things.

Let me give you an example. Say down the street I see a how with tin foiled windows. I assume it's a drug house and break in to search it. That's illegal no matter how much drugs I find in that house.

Now say this same house has a gas leak at the furnace. They furnace repair man come over enters the basement. Sees nothing illegal as all the drugs on second floor out of sight. He fixes the furnace then decides to search the rest of the house and finds the drugs. He then says "Oh I was just checking to see if heat was coming from all the vents". That to me is an illegal search but a judge might buy that excuse of why they were searching when they didn't need to nor had any right to.

In the end it's the judge who rules on the admissibility of evidence in voir dire. In case of the furnace tech they'd most likely rule it out. In fact as police they wouldn't even try to use this in court. They'd use it as anonymous tip to get an actual search warrant. If for what ever reason the the drugs were gone by the time the police go the warrant and did the search the furnace Techs testimony is useless.

So really this how the whole PC thing should have gone. The tech should have given an anonymous tip to the police. The police should then get search warrant and seize the PC legally. What they happened instead is the tech seized the PC after finding something they felt might be illegal and turned it over to the police then the police arrested the guy when he arrived to pickup he PC.

Posted by: voska   Posted on: 12/17/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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