Separating Hard Fact from Hard Drive: A Solution for Plain View Doctrine in the Digital Domain (Searches Involving Electronic Evidence‪)‬

I. Introduction In a two-day span, two different circuit splits developed over the issue of how to interpret the plain view doctrine for digital searches. (1) The judiciary has struggled for more than a decade with the application of the plain view doctrine in an electronic world. (2) However, the courts' attempts to adopt a constitutionally robust or logically coherent approach to computer searches within the doctrine's framework have met with failure.