Exclusionary Rule Good Faith Exception.

Byline: Derek Hawkins

7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Neil C. Kienast, et al.

Case No.: 17-1840;

Officials: RIPPLE, SYKES, and BARRETT, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Exclusionary Rule Good Faith Exception

In 2015, federal agents infiltrated a child pornography website called Playpen and deployed a computer program to identify Playpen's users. This operation resulted in the successful prosecution of defendants all around the country, including Neil Kienast, Marcus Owens, and Braman Broy, whose appeals are consolidated before us. Kienast, Owens, and Broy, like many other defendants caught in this sting, argue that the warrant authorizing the Playpen searches was invalid and that the fruit of those searchesthe defendants' identitiesshould therefore have been suppressed. Every circuit that has considered the suppression argument has rejected it, and so do we. Even assuming that these digital searches violated the Fourth...