14 DAY TRIAL // The controversial case in which a judge ordered a bank-fraud suspect to decrypt her laptop and hand over some information that may help prosecute her continues. The debates regarding the violation of the Fifth Amendment can be put aside for now, since the feds managed to decrypt the laptop without the defendant's help.
Wired reports that the suspect’s lawyer, Philip Dubois, said that the prosecution may have used one of the passwords provided by the co-defendant in the case, Scott Whatcott, which is the ex-husband of Ramona Fricosu, the defendant in the fraud case.
Dubois received a copy of the information discovered on the computer’s hard drive, but so far he didn’t get to examine it.
The legal action filed against Fricosu began just as any other fraud case, she and her husband being accused of filling fake documents to obtain home titles which they utilized to sell the houses to others without paying mortgage.
Some time after the trial started, when authorities determined that some important evidence may be hidden on her laptop, they convinced a judge to force her to hand over the hard drive’s contents.
This was an unprecedented decision since according to the Fifth Amendment, no one can be forced to incriminate himself (or herself in this case). However, the judge ordered the defendant to decrypt the unit herself, without handing over the password to others.
Things became even more complicated after the woman led people to believe that she may have forgotten the password. Even though she didn’t state this officially, her lawyer said that passwords are forgotten all the time in a previews interview with Wired.
From now on, the case will most likely follow its normal path, but no one should be surprised if Fricosu or her ex-husband come up with another encrypted computer that may hold evidence.