A Positive Outcome

I received the following e-mail this afternoon from one of my clients, Attorney Frank Twarog of Murdoch Hughes & Twarog, regarding a case on which we’ve been collaborating:

Props to Megan Campbell;  A grateful nod to Fred Lane.

I filed a motion to dismiss a child pornography case after determining that the State’s expert could not testify that there was evidence that my client “knowingly” possessed contraband images because she could not say that the images had been opened from a flood of other downloaded materials.  Notwithstanding this testimony, Judge Zonay DENIED my motion, without a hearing, citing the expert’s opinion that my client had “moved” the suspect materials from one folder to another, therein inferring the requisite element of knowledge.

Fred Lane then reviewed the order and went as far as completing a forensic review of the mirrored hard drive at the barracks.  He discovered that the images remained in their original downloaded folder and were not moved or opened (the downloaded date, last modified date and last viewed date occurred during the same 7 seconds as it originally took to download).

Last week, I filed a renewed motion to dismiss and requested a hearing.  To my pleasant surprise, Attorney Campbell reviewed Fred’s report with her own expert and prior to the scheduling of a hearing, took it upon herself to dismiss the charge.  It is a rare moment that such a serious charge is dismissed in this way, but in the face of solid exculpatory evidence, I am pleased that she demonstrated the integrity to short circuit a process that would have likely cost my client quite a bit in emotional and financial anxiety.

The key aspect of this case was that the Defendant used the news browser Newsleecher to download content. After reviewing the forensics evidence at the VT State Police lab, I downloaded Newsleecher and examined its default settings. By doing so, I was able to demonstrate that the Defendant had established a default download directory, but had not exercised any dominion or control of the files after they downloaded.