Background
The State of Oregon petitioned for reconsideration of the Oregon Court of Appeals’ precedential opinion in State v. Klaus, issued July 29, 2026. In that opinion, the court concluded that Steven Michael Klaus had no right to privacy under Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution in files located on a laptop because he no longer owned the laptop.
The state asked the court, among other things, to clarify that Klaus lacked a privacy interest in all contents of the laptop. Klaus filed a response to the petition.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals allowed reconsideration and modified footnote 5 of its prior opinion. It clarified that Klaus retained no privacy right in communications stored on the laptop itself, regardless of whether particular evidence recovered from the laptop might also have been stored by a third party, because Klaus no longer owned the laptop following the divorce.
The court distinguished Klaus’s circumstances from those of the defendant in De Witt Simons, who retained a privacy right in internet-usage information stored by third parties and, presumably, in content remaining on his laptop. Apart from the clarification to footnote 5, the court adhered to its prior opinion as written.
Key Takeaways
- A person who no longer owns a laptop may lack an Article I, section 9, privacy right in communications and other content stored on that device.
- The absence of a privacy right in the laptop’s contents does not change merely because a copy of particular evidence may also be stored by a third party.
- The court allowed reconsideration only to clarify its reasoning and otherwise left its prior opinion intact.
Why It Matters
The decision clarifies how Oregon’s constitutional search-and-seizure protections apply to digital evidence found on a device that the defendant no longer owns. The relevant distinction is between privacy rights in information held by third parties and privacy rights in content stored on the transferred device itself.
For practitioners, the modified opinion underscores that ownership and retained privacy interests can be decisive when challenging the examination of digital-device contents under Article I, section 9.