How Long Can The Police Keep My Electronic Devices?

Our firm represents a lot of clients. They come to our office and they’ve been charged with a particular crime and as part of the investigation the police have seized their electronic device. Their laptop, their iPad, their computer, their cell phone because the police want to do a further investigation to see if there’s evidence which supports and proves the crime in addition to the other evidence they have and they’ll ask us you know “will I get this back? I mean these are expensive devices, I’ve got an expensive computer. Will I ever get it back?” The answer to that really depends on a) whether the police find something of help to them in solving the crime, in proving the crime or b) the nature of what’s found on the computer.

So let me give you an example. They are going to search, they have to get a search warrant by the way to open the devices and search. They’re going to do that after they seize it. Go before a Judge or Justice of the Peace to get a search warrant, doing a forensic analysis of the computer or look for whatever they are looking for whether it’s Facebook threatening messages, whether it text, whether it’s harassing messages or things like child pornography if it’s a child pornography case. So it really depends. So if they find things like Facebook and text messages which support harassment, they are going to need that evidence for the trial if you go to trial and you’re not going to get that computer back perhaps until the end of the trial. You’d probably get it back in that scenario at the end of trial because the computer probably wasn’t used as a crime itself in a sense like child pornography you’re using the firm to search your child pornography, that type of person who is found with child pornography, they’re not going to get their devices back. Obviously in fact they’re going to if they lose their trial, they’re going to be prohibited from using a computer any way and they’re not going to get that one back. If they don’t find anything on the computer obviously they’ll give that back within a reasonable time period. So either you’re going to get it back soon, you’re going to get it back sometime after the trial or you’re never going to get it back depending on the situation. So that’s the short answer to those particular questions. It really depends on the facts of your particular case and we can help you with that, answer that question if you come to our office.