U.S. appeals court allows search of old PC files.

• Position: E-DISCOVERY

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a closely watched case, a U.S. appeals court has ruled that federal agents acted in good faith when executing a warrant to search records that had been seized two and a half years earlier.

The 12-to-1 decision by the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York restored a Connecticut accountant's 2011 jury conviction and two-year prison sentence for tax evasion, Reuters reported. A three-judge panel had overturned both in June 2014.

Stavros Ganias' computer files were seized in November 2003 by U.S. Army investigators examining possible overbilling by a military contractor that had employed Ganias as an accountant, according to Reuters. But instead of purging unnecessary files, the government held onto them, and in April 2006 got a warrant to search them for evidence of unrelated tax evasion by Ganias.

While the appeals court decision tested how long the government can keep a criminal suspect's computer data, the court did not answer the question of whether keeping the records for that long violated the suspect's Fourth Amendment rights.

In the 2014 ruling that voided the jury verdict, Circuit Judge Denny Chin, who was the lone dissenter in the most recent decision, said the government went too far by searching...