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Lawyers for a man convicted of child exploitation told the Indiana Supreme Court on Thursday that the evidence was obtained through an unlawfully late warrant — and shouldn’t have been considered by lower courts.
“We need police officers to comply with the law,” said Brandon Murphy, an attorney defending Connor Bosworth.
“We have a very simple directive, a fundamental one, to law enforcement officers on how they are to execute warrants,” Murphy continued. “It’s a statute that’s been on the books since 1981 and we can’t condone police officers who either knowingly or ignorantly fail to follow that statute.”
Bosworth was convicted in 2024 of 33 counts of felony child exploitation and possession of child sex abuse material. He was handed a 64-year sentence, with 23 years suspended to probation.
The Attorney General’s Office argued that other parts of Indiana Code address whether evidence should be admitted when statute is violated — and that its absence here was purposeful.
“I think the reason they (lawmakers) didn’t do it is … they think these competing interests need to be balanced … under the specific facts of that case,” Ellen Meilaender said. “And in this case, I think we have probably the strongest set of facts you could hypothesize for why exclusion would be a remedy wildly out of proportion to the degree of wrongdoing that occurred.”
An Indiana Court of Appeals order begins its retelling of the case on Nov. 21, 2022, when a young woman — anonymized in court records as S.C. — reported a harassment complaint. She told Hartford City Police officer Timothy Williams that an Instagram account had sent her a nude photograph of herself taken when she was under the age of 18.
Williams sent a preservation request to Meta, which owns Instagram, for several accounts that month. He applied for a search warrant for the accounts on Dec. 22, which the trial court approved and issued same-day.
Williams, who said he’d never investigated a case like Bosworth’s, had asked Lt. David Johnson for help. But, at the time he applied for and got the warrant, the two men were working opposite shifts, with Johnson frequently off work during the holiday season, according to the court ruling.
The warrant was executed Jan. 5, 2023 — after 14 days, longer than the 10-day deadline in Indiana law.
Williams turned the case over to Johnson, who received the Meta records Feb. 3 and continued the investigation. He executed a warrant to search Bosworth’s residence on Feb. 12. Officers recovered cellphones, laptops, hard drives and other data storage.
The Meta records included several images of nude infants and children. Bosworth’s cellphone, meanwhile, had hundreds of images of children engaging in sex acts or otherwise nude.
Bosworth moved to suppress the Meta records before the trial began, arguing the warrant for that information was executed outside the statutory deadline, but the trial court denied his motion.
He also made the argument during his bench trial. The trial court overruled his objections and admitted the evidence, leading to Bosworth’s conviction on all counts.
The appellate court affirmed the evidence’s admissibility — and the sentence — in the late 2025 order.
“Yeah, it was violated. What follows from that?” Justice Geoffrey Slaughter asked Thursday. “Indiana’s statute contains the deadline, but it doesn’t contain the prescription.”
Murphy, representing Bosworth, said letting courts decide whether to admit evidence from a late executed warrant would “render that particular language … of the statute meaningless.”
Meilaender argued the opposite, discouraging the justices from finding that violations necessitate suppression of the evidence.
“You’re imposing significant costs on society when you impede the truth-seeking mechanism of criminal trials by suppressing reliable evidence of guilt,” Meilaender said. “And if we don’t have a good enough benefit from suppression, we shouldn’t impose those costs. … The juice is not worth the squeeze.”
Bosworth’s sentence was also up for discussion.
Murphy said the defendant’s punishment exceeds the maximum sentence for a Level 1 felony. His convictions ranged from the lowest felony category — Level 6 — to Level 4 offenses.
“In our statutes, the worst child molesting offense would carry a maximum of 40 years,” he said. “Mr. Bosworth will serve 41. … We would submit that that is excessive and inappropriate.”
Meilaender countered that Bosworth’s charges could have landed him a sentence of up to 127 years.
She also emphasized the hundreds of images he possessed and used to harass victims, along with the rape fantasies he wrote out in his Instagram messages.
“Given the seriousness of his crimes, it’s hard-pressed to see how that sentence isn’t appropriate,” Meilaender said.
She urged the justices not to reconsider Bosworth’s sentence, noting that, in the future, he could try demonstrating his rehabilitation to lighten up his probation conditions.
Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: [email protected].
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