Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the truth. Nevertheless, the truth deserves to be heard. The fake news you read about your petitioner was based on a perjured affidavit. The truth was very different than that.

On September 25, 2015, around 2:00 pm (a Friday afternoon), a torrent file, masqueraded as “homemade models” that contained a few disgusting images/videos, was downloaded into a computer in your petitioner’s home from the BitTorrent network. The computer was used for a home business run by your petitioner’s wife. She had couple of hundreds clients at that time and many of them had access to that computer. Anyone of them might have downloaded that file by mistake.

Your petitioner was working for JPMorgan Chase at that time at the Chicago downtown office. He got home around 6:00 pm from work and discovered these files on the computer around 6:30 pm and deleted them in a hurry. Within seconds they were all deleted permanently.

On December 10, 2015, three months after that incident, a former detective from Naperville PD showed up at your petitioner’s door with a search warrant. He seized all the computers in the house but didn’t find a single file that he was looking for. However, that didn’t stop him from bringing up these outrageous charges against your petitioner just because these files were downloaded from a file sharing network.

During the discovery phase, a copy of the search warrant affidavit was provided to your petitioner’s attorney. It’s then found that the former detective made multiple false statements in the search warrant affidavit. He concocted a story of a second time downloading on October 14, 2015 by your petitioner. Without this fabrication, he most likely couldn’t establish probable cause to secure a search warrant from the magistrate judge based on an one-time incident that happened three months earlier.

The Founding Fathers crafted the Fourth Amendment in direct response to “the harsh experience of householders having their doors hammered open by magistrates and writ-bearing agents of the crown.” However, the Fourth Amendment “is no barrier at all if it can be evaded by a policeman concocting a story that he feeds a magistrate.”

https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1632&context=fac_articles

Cases presenting the issue of allegedly falsified warrant affidavits arise routinely in the lower courts throughout the United States. After hearing the case Franks v. Delaware in 1978, the Supreme Court made the following ruling:

[W]e hold that, where the defendant makes a substantial preliminary showing that a false statement knowingly and intentionally, or with reckless disregard for the truth, was included by the affiant in the warrant affidavit, and if the alleged false statement is necessary to the finding of probable cause, the Fourth Amendment requires that a hearing be held at the defendant’s request. In the event that at that hearing the allegation of perjury or reckless disregard is established by the defendant by a preponderance of the evidence, and, with the affidavit’s false material set to one side, the affidavit’s remaining content is insufficient to establish probable cause, the search warrant must be voided and the fruits of the search excluded.

Based on this settled law, your petitioner’s attorney filed a motion for Frank’s hearing to squash the search warrant.

Not long after the motion was filed, all of these outrageous charges against your petitioner were dropped; the prosecutor on the case resigned from the State’s Attorney’s office and the former detective took an early retirement and left the police department.

May the truth set you free.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. – Buddha