A jury trial of your peers is a rare thing these days. This is how it would go down:
The investigator says "who's been downloading CP?" and everyone looks at you. Probably because you're the weirdo internet geek among the family/roommates. They now have a suspect, and nothing you say then will convince them otherwise. They interview everyone separately leading the conversation to get statements about circumstantial things that out of context don't make you look good.
It's enough to get a search & data warrant. They take your phone, your PC, all your hard drives, and pull every website you've ever accessed and every email you've ever received or sent. They trawl through this for anything out of place, or which can be construed out of context to be something they can pin on you. This is no longer about CP--they "know" you are guilty, but the fact that they can't find any CP on your computer just means your smart enough to know how to hide it. Now they're just trying to find something to stick to put you away. The Al Capone nail-him-on-tax-evasion-or-whatever-sticks strategy.
You don't hear anything for a while so you think this whole thing is behind you, and you're just pissed you can't get your PC and phone back. Then they show up and arrest you. Your lawyer explains there are five felony charges against you, including the CP thing, and you're looking at 30 years to life where the survival time of a CP convict in the general population is about 3 days. The evidence is flimsy and you can fight these charges in court, but it'll cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and your success at winning all counts is really up to the whims of the judge and/or jury. The DA offers a plea deal: 3 years house arrest, community service, and registration on the sex offenders list, but critically: no prison. The weekend is coming and you're going to be shipped out from the local police lockbox to county jail. The DA is dragging his feet on getting you into protective custody. You sign the plea deal and walk out alive, but fucked for life.
Welcome to the modern criminal justice system.
[This more or less happened to a college roommate of mine (not CP though), and a Tor developer I knew through work.]
This is exactly how the legal system works. You are railroaded from the start and effectively coerced into a plea. Truth does not matter. Justice is exceptionally rare. It is terrifying.
That sounds incredibly dysfunctional and rather scary. However, if I'm to be a bit sceptical, of the five felonies the cops found evidence for on your roommates computer, how many had he actually committed?
Maybe he was just guilty but told you he's innocent. That's what most people do, what I'd do.
My roommate was only guilty of a misdemeanor afaik. At least two of the felony counts he was provably (to me) innocent of, as I knew he wasn’t where they claimed he was, but someone with more reputation than The Defendant’s College Roommate was willing to perjure themself, and it was their word against mine. Ironically the things he definitely wasn’t guilty of were the only parts of the plea deal. He pled guilty to things he didn’t do, just to put a max threshold on how bad the nightmare could get.
The other case was during the TLA infiltration of senior Tor leadership 5-ish years ago. It was very clearly driven by spy agency needs and I don’t feel comfortable sharing details online.
[Aside: you should consider Tor compromised. Use it as a VPN if you want, but don’t entrust your own safety or the safety of others to it.]
It's exactly this attitude of desperately wanting to believe the police that ensures minimal accountability so it continues. I want to as well but is it really possible as soon as you start looking a bit harder at the situation?
J. Edgar Hoover is still venerated by having his name on the HQ building in Washington. There's no doubt left about exactly what he was.
The roommate, yes. The Tor thing was in Europe. My hypothetical was based on the terrible US legal system though which Europe mostly doesn’t share. A big reason the Tor folks relocated to places like Germany was exactly because there is a legal system there that actually respects the spirit and letter of the law.
The investigator says "who's been downloading CP?" and everyone looks at you. Probably because you're the weirdo internet geek among the family/roommates. They now have a suspect, and nothing you say then will convince them otherwise. They interview everyone separately leading the conversation to get statements about circumstantial things that out of context don't make you look good.
It's enough to get a search & data warrant. They take your phone, your PC, all your hard drives, and pull every website you've ever accessed and every email you've ever received or sent. They trawl through this for anything out of place, or which can be construed out of context to be something they can pin on you. This is no longer about CP--they "know" you are guilty, but the fact that they can't find any CP on your computer just means your smart enough to know how to hide it. Now they're just trying to find something to stick to put you away. The Al Capone nail-him-on-tax-evasion-or-whatever-sticks strategy.
You don't hear anything for a while so you think this whole thing is behind you, and you're just pissed you can't get your PC and phone back. Then they show up and arrest you. Your lawyer explains there are five felony charges against you, including the CP thing, and you're looking at 30 years to life where the survival time of a CP convict in the general population is about 3 days. The evidence is flimsy and you can fight these charges in court, but it'll cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and your success at winning all counts is really up to the whims of the judge and/or jury. The DA offers a plea deal: 3 years house arrest, community service, and registration on the sex offenders list, but critically: no prison. The weekend is coming and you're going to be shipped out from the local police lockbox to county jail. The DA is dragging his feet on getting you into protective custody. You sign the plea deal and walk out alive, but fucked for life.
Welcome to the modern criminal justice system.
[This more or less happened to a college roommate of mine (not CP though), and a Tor developer I knew through work.]