Legal Question in Criminal Law in Missouri

Re: Computer

Can police get a warrant to seize a drive when they already know what it contains? Yes. Note also that the printout may not be as complete as you assume it is, which means that there may be information on the drive which the police don't already have.

Remote-access programs like pcAnywhere can make it harder for police to tie a particular person to a particular hard drive, but so what? The fact that more than one person has access a particular drive is no different from the fact that more than one person has access to a particular room. The prosecution can still investigate the crime and build a case against one of the people with access, either by finding corroborating evidence against him or by ruling out the others (or both).

Your question suggests that you think evidence which is less than 100% certain can't be used, but that isn't how it works. In the real world most evidence is ambiguous to some degree. The key question is whether it creates a reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt. Keep in mind that not all doubts are reasonabke, so merely pointing to a possible alternate explanation probably won't work unless you can show some reason to think this possible explanation is actually true.

The mere existence of programs like pcAnywhere won't help much in your case, since these programs only work when they are installed on both the user's computer and the computer which contains the target hard drive. If you don't have pcAnywhere then you won't get far by arguing that someone who does was able to access your disk drive. And even if you do have the software, that fact is not enough to win the case for you. pcAnywhere creates logs which show what data was accessed as well as when and by whom. It also has security features which make it very difficult for someone to gain access without your permission. Since the police evidently have the hard drive, they will be able to look at these logs and see if your claims have any support. Since it sounds like you don't actually believe this happened, my sense is that there will be no evidence to support your argument.

Re: Computer

I do not know much about hard drives so I cannot assume that a printout of everything on a hard drive is really all that is on a hard drive. However, if the print out creates probable cause that crime may be afoot within your computer, then a valid warrant may be obtained by the police and your hard drive may be searched.