To be fair, it's not that simple, and having read the article you should know as much instead of painting this false argument.

What ELSE did they wipe?

>the phone was rife with “numerous sexually explicit messages and images” sent to the victim as well as “significant personally identifying information about her” is not clear error. The record reveals that these conversations occurred over multiple apps on the phone and that Stathas also received explicit photos of the minor. The court did not clearly err by crediting the government’s assertion that “no procedure short of digitally wiping” the phone would eliminate all criminal or harmful material.

So a convicted child molester used multiple phone apps to contact his victim, and instead of going into every app on the phone to see if it had child sex abuse evidence the police just wiped his phone. The court said (more or less) "that's not unreasonable: cops have better things to do than hand wipe criminals' phones of criminal evidence".

Now is there a larger question here? Sure ... but lets not pretend police clearing evidence of child sex abuse from a phone (which the convicted child sex abuser claimed contained evidence ... for a lawsuit that very likely would never happen) is as simple as "police deleting evidence of their wrongdoing".

Not in America, no - https://eji.org/issues/qualified-immunity/

We need our slave catchers and Pinkertons as immune as possible from accountability. How else will they protect the interests of capital?

We all know the answer to this: this would be by far the best cybersecurity practice ... but costs a relatively small amount of money.

I assumed civil forfeiture meant they wouldn’t get returned, and probably get destroyed after some delay. I’m curious too…

Okay, so -- your flip answer is pretty much exactly how the law should not operate?

That's the point of law. To come up with principles that you can follow consistently, regardless of your feelings in the situation.

I would say they should have only deleted the data that was found to be illegal, but if that data was all over the place... I find it hard to sympathize.

Seizing and selling or destroying property used in the commission of a crime is common. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me if the value of the property is in proportion to the severity of the crime, and the owner of the property has been convicted of the crime (i.e. it's not civil asset forfeiture).

Ah, see that's what I thought at first.

But then I thought, no, don't delete it.

Because then you can bust them for possessing CSAM again, just about as soon as you hand it over, if you've a suitably vindictive frame of mind, and you've no reason not to.

I would go so far as to preserve the complete, forensically-vouched data image that the original prosecution relied on. The good, the bad, and the ugly. At the offender’s own expense, as you mention; for as long as they want to keep paying before they bring their lawsuit (or not).

If the claim is that some of the material there evidences police abuses of some sort, you can’t really let the offender pick the stuff they feel supports their claim and wipe the stuff that might weaken it.

And if there’s criminal material mixed in with the other, non-offending data that the offender claims they need, it seems like you kind of need some kind of adjudication process on an item-by-item basis.

They’ve clearly worked out a way to manage custody, access, and review for the purposes of the initial prosecution. Let the offender fund it under the same terms until they either fish or cut bait. Maybe if their claim of police abuse works out, this might be among the costs the court could award.

Maybe I'm ignorant of the "cocaine community", but is the packaging intended to be reused? Because I highly doubt it. A smartphone isn't intended to be disposable.

> If you are going to release them, which I would not be in favor of, you ban them from all electronic devices.

I want to ask two questions here.

If you believe the prison system can change people and make them better, consider how you would live your current life without access to all electronic devices. Do you still think a flat out ban is reasonable?

If you don't think the prison system can bring about actual change then what do you believe the alternative is?

I think my question boils down to this.

Would you be willing to spend a portion of your salary for the rest of your working life to support a pedophile? That is exactly what would happen if they were cut off from all electronic devices or imprisoned for life.

I see no indication that anybody is arguing that they should not have deleted the images in question, and the police argument appears to have been more about making sure that all contact information across various apps was deleted anyway. The arguments are a) does that mean all the data on the phone needed to be deleted? (Doubtful) b) does that mean that none of the data on the phone could reasonably be extracted first? (doubtful)