On Wednesday, the Sixth Circuit decided that if law enforcement officers can connect a suspect to a crime involving a computer, no matter how minor its role, they can search the suspect’s home. In the instant case, a suspect’s home was searched because the alleged crime involved computer-generated flyers.
In upholding this bizarre overreach, the court analogized computers to guns.
It is clear that the use of a gun in the commission of a crime is sufficient to establish a nexus between the suspected criminal’s gun and his residence. Computers are dissimilar to guns in many ways, including the nature of the crimes in which they are used and the relative ease with which guns can be transported and discarded. Computers are similar to guns, however, in that they are both personal possessions often kept in their owner’s residence and therefore subject to the presumption that a nexus exists between an object used in a crime and the suspect’s current residence. This is borne out by our cases involving the consumption of child pornography via computer.