All police officers know the plain view doctrine. You are lawfully in a place, you see contraband, its criminal nature is obvious, and you can seize it. It's the bag of pills on a passenger seat seen during a traffic stop.
What about plain view in a digital world? You have a warrant for drug evidence. The examiner is scrolling through a media folder. A video appears to have nothing to do with narcotics and everything to do with a felony nobody knew about. Is that plain view? Can you keep it? Can you start working the new case right then?
The US First Circuit Court of Appeals took up a version of that problem on May 18, 2026, in United States v. Deschambault. The ruling and the older Tenth Circuit case mentioned in the opinion together provide practical guidance on how to handle unexpected evidence in a digital search.
Plain View Defined
Plain view has three requirements.
First, lawful vantage point. The officer must be somewhere he is entitled to be. In a digital search, that means executing a valid warrant and looking in places the warrant allows.
Second, immediately apparent incriminating character. The evidentiary value must be obvious on its face, without further searching to establish it.
Third, lawful right of access. Seeing it is not enough. The officer must be able to get to it without another intrusion.
The Case
In August 2019, Maine drug agents arrested Rayevon Deschambault after a controlled buy. In the car they recovered two phones, a loaded handgun, a scale with cocaine residue, and packaging consistent with distribution. A state judge issued a warrant to search Deschambault's iPhone for records tied to the trafficking, and for material showing who owned and used the device.
While executing that warrant, the agent found three videos. Two involved Deschambault and a female who looked young to the agent. The third had no sexual content and showed the same female standing in Deschambault's bedroom — the identical room where officers had already recovered cash and drugs — with Deschambault panning the camera around and describing the room as a "dirty ass trap house room."
The agent did not recognize the female. He circulated a clothed picture to other officers, one of whom identified her as a fourteen-year-old known from prior drug activity. Investigators located her, interviewed her, and learned she knew Deschambault by his street alias, knew he and his girlfriend sold cocaine, and had been asked to help.
Then, and very importantly, they went back to a federal magistrate and obtained a second warrant authorizing a search of the phone for evidence of child exploitation. Deschambault was convicted on two counts of Sexual Exploitation of a Minor and sentenced to 216 months.
The Plain View Argument
Deschambault argued that once the agent noticed the female looked underage and began working to identify her, he had left the drug warrant behind and was investigating a different crime without authority.
The First Circuit disagreed, and the reasoning is important. The court did not need to rely on plain view because it found the videos fell inside the original warrant. The bedding, the wall paneling, and the background matched the room where drugs and cash were seized. Deschambault's own recorded statements tied that room to distribution. The videos helped establish who had custody of the phone and connected him to the stash location.
The vantage point was lawful. The right of access was lawful. And the incriminating character was apparent without any further searching. All three tenets satisfied.
The court then addressed the juvenile's identification effort separately and rejected the idea that following the lead was improper. Evidence lawfully seized under a warrant for one crime can be used to investigate another. Identifying the female was not abandoning the drug case — it was advancing it, and it produced a witness who could place Deschambault in the room with the narcotics. As a different federal case stated decades ago, when an investigation of one crime uncovers a trail to another, following that trail is the investigator's job.
Where Digital Plain View Can Go Wrong
Deschambault leaned on US v. Carey, and the contrast between the two cases is the training point.
In Carey, a Tenth Circuit case from 1999, an officer had a warrant to search a computer for evidence of drug sales. He opened a file and found child pornography. At that moment he was squarely within plain view. Had he stopped, documented it, and applied for a second warrant, the analysis would have been straightforward.
He did not stop. He testified that he then spent roughly five hours opening additional image files, one after another, looking for more of the same. He was no longer searching for drug evidence. He was conducting a warrantless search for child pornography using a drug warrant as the entry ticket. Every file after the first one failed the lawful access requirement, because the warrant did not authorize a hunt for that material.
The First Circuit separated Deschambault from Carey on two grounds. The videos here were directly relevant to the drug investigation, which was not true in Carey. And the agent here did not convert his search into a child exploitation search without authority. He got the federal warrant first.
Takeaways
Draft the affidavit carefully. The categories requested should be justified in your own words, based on your training and experience, and tied to the crime you are investigating.
Establish custody of the device. Putting the device under the control of your target is critical. Like the investigators in Deschambault, add a category requesting evidence of care, custody, and control of the device.
Document the moment. When something unexpected surfaces, note what you saw, when you saw it, and whether it connects to the crime in your warrant. If it does connect, say how.
Get the second warrant. Do not exceed the scope of the original. The line between Deschambault and Carey is not what the investigator found — it is what he did in the ten minutes after he found it. One went back to a judge. One kept clicking.
Digital evidence issues in your case?
Let's talk through the search.