A federal judge has ordered a hearing to determine whether the FBI deliberately or recklessly obtained faulty search warrants in the Candyman online child porn case.
That case involves about a hundred defendants said to have received child porn from the Candyman Website. The question around the warrants is whether the FBI agents involved ignored the likelihood that not every subscriber to the site automatically received child porn e-mails from other members, according to the New York Law Journal.
But it turned out that those who subscribed to the site had options including a choice not to receive e-mail at all, the Law Journal said, prompting Eastern District Judge Dennis Hurley to overturn a fellow judge's ruling that using false information to get warrants didn't invalidate a search of one man's home in the case.
"Defendants have the better side of the argument in my view," Hurley ruled, adding that if the erroneous information had not been in the original warrants, little would have been known about two defendants "beyond their membershp to the Website."
Hurley also spurned a prosecution argument that because the "majority" of Candyman's members were likely to have child porn on their computers, the whole membership could be searched, the Law Journal said. "The idea of a warrant issuing solely upon group probabilities, rather than upon individualized information -- a proposition, I believe, to be implicit in some of the decisions cited by the government -- is troubling," Hurley wrote in his ruling.
Hurley may be flying in the face of his fellow Eastern District judges, but he's not out of line with other district court rulings on the question, including from Southern District of New York Judge Denny Chin in March. Chin had suppressed evidence gained through a similarly faulty warrant, the Law Journal said, as has a federal judge in Missouri.
