Georgia court finds probable cause though investigator did not contact person who discovered CP

The Georgia Court of Appeals held in Manzione v. State that the failure of a Georgia investigator to contact the Yahoo! employee who reported child pornography to NCMEC did not invalidate a search warrant. 719 S.E.2d 533 (2011).

An employee at Yahoo! discovered four images of child pornography and tracked the IP address to Athens, Georgia. The employee reported this information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) where the images and information were forwarded to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. An agent then tracked the IP address to the defendant's address and obtained a search warrant.

On appeal, Manzione contested admission of evidence on the grounds that probable cause did not exist because the information obtained by the agent was hearsay "and that NCMEC was an unreliable source" as the agent should have directly contacted the Yahoo! employee. The court found "that NCMEC was nothing more than a pass-through entity" and though the agent probably should have contacted Yahoo!, the information could have been presumed reliable. Therefore, sufficient probable cause existed for the search.

RELATED CASE: Almost the same situation arose in another Georgia appellate case involving a report from Google to NCMEC in James v. State, 312 Ga. App. 130 (2011).