Fr. James Jackson, a member of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, has petitioned a federal court to throw out evidence of child pornography taken from a seized hard drive, on the grounds that the hard drive’s seizure violated the 4th Amendment.
In a motion filed Oct. 5 in a U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, Jackson’s attorney argued that the warrant used to seize a laptop and hard drive in his rectory last year failed to meet the 4th Amendment’s requirement of “particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”
“[S]imply put, the warrant authorized a constitutionally impermissible, general search, for which suppression is now required,” Jackson’s attorney argued in the motion.
The priest’s attorney said police should have done more work to identify a specific suspect before acting on electronic evidence of child pornography trafficking, especially because several people lived and worked on the Rhode Island church property where Jackson was arrested last October.
“This case is different than the typical case where an identified person’s IP address for his residence is involved,” Jackson’s attorney argued.
“It presents the need for regulation of searches that do not particularly describe the location to be searched or the thing to be seized when dealing with multiple buildings, residents, and employees and multiple potential devices containing massive amounts of digital information.”
Jackson was arrested Oct. 30, 2021, after state police identified a device sharing child pornography with an IP address assigned to St. Mary’s Catholic Parish in Providence, RI, where Jackson served.
Law enforcement officers executed a search warrant and found an external hard drive containing child pornography, which they say belonged to Jackson.
The priest has been charged with possessing and distributing child pornography. But his lawyer now argues the state search leading to that charge was unconstitutional.
Before Jackson’s arrest, a police detective “had information that child pornography was viewed utilizing an IP address that was assigned to the church, which included multiple buildings such as the church itself and a detached rectory building that contains church offices and residences of parish priests. The internet service, utilizing the IP address, was subscribed to and paid for by the church’s bookkeeper,” the priest’s Oct. 5 motion said.
“Law enforcement made no effort to narrow down the potential defendant among the multiple employees and priests, and parishioners of the church, or the particular device that was involved in viewing the child pornography.”
The brief complained that “everything electronic contained in multiple buildings, including a church open to the public, the church offices of employees, and the residences of priests were listed to be seized, without narrowing down the owner or keeper of the information, or the device used for viewing suspected child pornography.”
Jackson’s lawyer argued that to do better due diligence, “the officer may have shown probable cause in a case such as this … by a less intrusive investigation, to seize and search the internet router for the IP address in order to determine which devices were connected to the targeted IP address at the time when police witnessed child pornography being shared using that address.”
The brief did not dispute the federal assertion that child pornography was found on seized devices at the rectory of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Providence, Rhode Island, or suggest that the devices belonged to someone other than Jackson.
According to the federal court system, the prosecutor's response to the motion is due by Oct. 19.
Jackson has pled not guilty to the federal charges.
The priest is a prominent member of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a clerical association which offers the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, or Traditional Latin Mass. Jackson was the long-time pastor of a Colorado parish before he was transferred to Rhode Island.
The priest was released after his arrest last year, and was living with a relative in Kansas. But in July, Jackson was arrested in Kansas for allegedly violating the terms of his pre-trial release - and it later emerged that he had become a suspect in a Kansas child porn investigation - distinct from the investigation in which he was originally arrested.
The priest is now incarcerated in a federal detention center in Rhode Island. His priestly faculties have been suspended.
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Editor's note: This report initially said that Jackson had "maintained his innocence." In fact, the priest has pled not guilty, but has not otherwise made a statement as to his alleged crimes. The report has been corrected.
