If you quickly read the first couple sentences in United States v. Burgard, you would think that the Seventh Circuit was about to reverse the case (2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 6555 (7th Cir.)):
Expecting to find evidence of child pornography, police officers seized Joshua Burgard's cell phone without a warrant. At that point, however, they seemed to have lost their sense of urgency: they did nothing with the phone right away...
Your impression would be wrong, however. Law enforcement waited six days to obtain a search warrant for the phone. Once they did, child pornography was found, and the defendant was later convicted. On appeal, Burgard argued for suppression of the evidence, arguing that the six-day delay made the search unreasonable.
The Seventh Circuit acknowledged that "at some point the delay becomes unreasonable", but "[t]here is unfortunately no bright line" to determine when that may be. Here, however, the search was not unreasonable. The court noted that "the officers did not act with perfect diligence," [b]ut police imperfection is not enough to warrant reversal.
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