The King County (Wash.) Library System prevailed in a lawsuit August 13 that asked for the immediate return of two computers seized in early July by the Kent Police Department. Law-enforcement officers took the workstations as part of an investigation into whether a patron had accessed images of child pornography May 31 at KCLS’s Kent branch.
“The library isn’t trying to stop police from legitimate police investigations,” library attorney Paul Kundtz said in the August 14 Kent South County Journal. “We simply want them to follow the law.”
Court documents state that a patron reported to a Kent library worker June 28 that someone had been viewing sexually explicit images on a library machine; however, the informant left before the staff could examine the computer in question. Several days later, library officials denied a police detective’s request for the names of every patron that had used an Internet workstation since May 31, explaining that the online cache is automatically purged daily. “Are we going to invade the privacy of all the law-abiding people who use the library in order to catch one person?” ACLU of Washington spokesperson Aaron Caplan asked in the Journal.
Because the investigation is ongoing, U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Pechman instructed KCLS not to alter the computers.
Posted August 19, 2002.