Nxivm leader Keith Raniere has already successfully kept child sexual assault and child porn charges severed from his upcoming trial. Can he keep the evidence of those child porn images out of the trial as well?
While Raniere’s Nxivm co-defendants were pleading guilty to avoid trial in recent weeks, Raniere attacked the new charges against him that arrived with the government’s second superseding indictment. Among those were allegations that he had sex with a girl of 15, and that he had naked images of the girl on a hard drive found at a house he used as a residence in Halfmoon, New York.
But Raniere convinced Judge Nicholas Garaufis that the child sex allegations were all confined to the Northern District of New York. The Nxivm trial is happening in the Eastern District, in Brooklyn, because the racketeering and other charges he’s facing stem from incidents that happened not only in the Albany area but in New York City.
After prosecutors agreed that Raniere was correct, Judge Nicholas Garaufis dropped the child sex charges, which may be taken up by prosecutors in the Northern District, which would mean a subsequent trial in Albany.
But even though those charges are no longer part of the Brooklyn trial, prosecutors still plan to bring in the child porn images.
Raniere is now fighting that by saying the images were improperly seized by the FBI. He argues that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy at 8 Hale Drive, the residence in Halfmoon that was searched. And he points out that the search was conducted under a warrant that limited it to seizing items that were evidence of crimes going back to January 1, 2015.
The images of the girl, identified only as Jane Doe 2, were dated 2005 in a folder labeled “BACKUPS.” (In a previous filing, Raniere’s attorney Marc Agnifilo had argued that there was no evidence the images had been accessed since that time.)
In other words, Raniere is arguing that because the FBI wasn’t looking for images from 2005, they shouldn’t have been seized, and the government shouldn’t be allowed to use them as evidence in the trial.
Given Garaufis’s previous rulings, which way do you think he’ll rule on this one?
Here’s the document…
Nxivm Doc 580: Motion to Su… by on Scribd
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Posted by Tony Ortega on April 24, 2019 at 12:00
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Tony Ortega is a journalist who was formerly the editor of The Village Voice. He’s written about Scientology since 1995, and in May 2015 released a book about Scientology’s harassment of Paulette Cooper titled ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely,’ and more recently a compilation of his stories, ‘Battlefield Scientology.’ He continues to monitor breaking developments in the Scientology world, as well as other subjects at The Underground Bunker. You can reach him by sending him a message at tonyo94 AT gmail.com (Drop him a line if you’d like to get an e-mail whenever a new story is posted.)
