United States v. Parrish, No. 18-3446 (6th Cir. 2019)
Annotate this CaseFranklin County officers detected child pornography being downloaded via file-sharing software. They traced the downloads to Meckley's IP address. Meckley lived with Parrish. Parrish had a North Carolina conviction for “indecent liberties with children.” Days later, officers executed a warrant. Officers, wearing sidearms, asked Parrish to speak to them in their mobile forensic lab. Parrish agreed, told the agents he understood his Miranda rights, volunteered that he had nude pictures of his 12-year-old daughter on his cell phone, then surrendered the phone and its password. Parrish explained that he had discovered the videos on his daughter’s phone after she sent them to a man on Facebook, prompting Parrish to copy them to confront her. Parrish signed a consent form authorizing a search of his daughter’s phone. Forensic evidence confirmed that his daughter had sent the images on Facebook although Parrish had taken a separate inappropriate video of her. He had watched them repeatedly and had not confronted his daughter or her (custodial) grandparents. Convicted of receiving child pornography, 18 U.S.C. 2252, Parrish received a sentence of 180 months, the mandatory minimum for someone with a prior offense relating to “abusive sexual conduct involving a minor.” The Sixth Circuit affirmed. Even if the warrant technically did not permit a search of Parrish and the cell phone on him, the officers reasonably could have believed it did and Parrish consented to the seizure and search. The court rejected a constitutional challenge to the definition of “sexually explicit conduct” to include “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person,”
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