In United States v. Pothier, --- F.3d ---, No. 18-1561 (1st Cir. 2019), the Court vacated the defendant's conviction for knowingly possessing child pornography, finding the evidence insufficient.
The contraband was found on the defendant's laptop, which was accessible by at least two other people and did not have a password.
Here's the relevant discussion:
[W]e begin by spelling out the scenario the government's theory necessarily posits: Pothier downloaded the file-sharing program Shareaza, the fileshredding program Evidence Eliminator, and child pornography, but decided to forgo password protection and then left the laptop in the living room of a residence at which two other people received mail. Furthermore, during the fifteen or so minutes when he knew the police were at the door, Pothier did not conceal or destroy the laptop or run the file-shredding Evidence Eliminator program that the government presumes he had installed.
A contrary scenario consistent with the limited evidence is that Pritchard or Balis used the readily available laptop during Pothier's frequent absences to download the file-sharing and fileshredding applications and the child pornography. Neither of them could have put a password on the computer without alerting Pothier. And because they were not present when the police came calling, neither of them could have hidden or destroyed the computer, or erased the child pornography, when the need to do so arose.
How could jurors rationally decide beyond a reasonable doubt which scenario describes what happened? In many cases, jurors rely on their assessments of witnesses' credibility to select between views of the evidence. Here, though, each competing scenario presumes the accuracy of the testimony proffered by the government, so credibility determinations cannot explain the conviction. Each scenario is plausible, and though one might debate their relative merits, to settle on one beyond reasonable doubt would require guesswork. And "[g]uilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be premised on pure conjecture."
The Court then concluded: "If Pothier is factually innocent, then he has suffered a great wrong and the guilty person remains free. Conversely, if Pothier is factually guilty, he goes free only because the prosecution failed to gather and present readily accessible evidence. In either event, it is uncharacteristic prosecutorial torpor -- not undue judicial rigor -- that prevented justice from being done."
