Background
While staying at his ex-wife’s home, Kenneth Michael Mininger secretly placed cameras in her minor daughter’s bedroom and a shared bathroom. The daughter discovered the cameras, removed their unsecured SD cards, and reviewed footage that included recordings of her and a friend. After Mininger left the home, his ex-wife gave police written consent to examine the cards. Officers found recordings of the daughter undressing when she was between 14 and 16 years old.
Using information from the cards, law enforcement obtained warrants for Mininger’s residence, vehicles, person, and electronic devices. A forensic examination uncovered encrypted child sexual abuse material, including recordings of Mininger sexually abusing an eight-year-old. Mininger moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that police needed a warrant to search the SD cards and that the subsequent warrants were tainted and overbroad. The district court denied the motion, after which Mininger conditionally pleaded guilty to two counts, received a 600-month sentence, and reserved his suppression arguments for appeal.
The Court’s Holding
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed. It held that Mininger had no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the SD cards because he placed them unsecured in shared areas of another person’s home, where residents or guests could readily discover and examine them, and used them to make voyeuristic recordings without the homeowner’s knowledge or consent. His status as an overnight guest did not create a legitimate privacy interest in recordings made by exceeding the scope of the host’s permission and violating the privacy of her family.
The court also rejected Mininger’s contention that the warrants had to restrict the device searches by date or by the identities of the people depicted. Unlike searches of cloud accounts controlled by third parties, searches of physical storage devices may require examination of obscure, mislabeled, or encrypted data. Because the relevant warrant limited the search and seizure to records relating to child pornography and sexual exploitation, it was sufficiently particular and not overbroad.
Key Takeaways
- An overnight guest had no reasonable expectation of privacy in unsecured SD cards secretly placed in shared rooms to record the host’s family.
- The court distinguished physical-device searches from cloud-account searches because locally stored evidence may be concealed through obscure folders, misleading filenames, or encryption.
- A warrant for records relating to child pornography and sexual exploitation was not overbroad merely because it lacked date-based or file-category restrictions.
Why It Matters
The decision limits Fourth Amendment protection for digital media deliberately left accessible in shared spaces, particularly when the media were used to invade the privacy of others. It also confirms that, in the Eleventh Circuit, warrants to search physical electronic devices need not invariably contain temporal or file-category limits when the nature of digital storage and concealment makes such restrictions impracticable.