Wen Fa is an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a national, nonprofit legal organization that represents clients free of charge.

We talked about his work on cases including Rentberry v. City of Seattle about rent-bidding laws, and another tenant/landlord case, Pakdel v. City and County of San Francisco, and various cases about Vaping.

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Francis

Rawls is in jail. And that’s where he’s staying. He lost his case at the

3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. So what has he been convicted

of? Nothing.

Rawls, a former Philadelphia police officer

has been in jail 17 months because he invoked the

Fifth Amendment, he said he wouldn’t give self-incriminating information to

police investigating him. But the Fifth Amendment is, you know, the Fifth

Amendment. It guarantees the right not to incriminate yourself.

The exact text is no person “shall be

compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”. So how come

the court denied his appeal, with three judges voting unanimously against him? It’s

partly because the information that the police and the courts want him to hand

over, and that he is refusing, are the passwords to encrypted external hard drives

that were connected to his computer. The police seized them, along with his

computer because they believe they contain child porn, and they do have good

reason to believe that, and they convinced a judge to give them a warrant to

seize and search his computer.

The appeals court ruled that forensic

examination showed that Rawls had downloaded thousands of files, the hash

values of which indicated they were child pornography.  That’s a bit of geek-speak but it means they

were monitoring his online activity, they didn’t get the actual files, but they