The Lane County District Attorney has dropped a child pornography case after a recent Oregon Supreme Court decision reversed a lower court’s ruling, causing the loss of a key piece of evidence.
Randall De Witt Simons used the public Wi-Fi of a fast food restaurant in Oakridge to access explicit images of minors from 2018 to 2019.
The restaurant’s owner contacted law enforcement in July 2018 and agreed to gather information about De Witt Simons’ activity on the network for nearly a year, at which time De Witt Simons’ home was searched and electronic devices containing child pornography were found.
He was convicted on 15 counts of first-degree encouraging child sexual abuse and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
But Oregon Supreme Court justices overturned lower court rulings on March 26, 2026 and excluded the activity logs gathered by the restaurant owner.
“[The owner and a consultant’s] actions in assisting law enforcement were governmental conduct. That conduct invaded a protected privacy interest recognized,” Supreme Court Justice Bronson James wrote in the majority opinion.
The opinion said De Witt Simons had a reasonable expectation of privacy on the public network despite it being publicly available and an acknowledgement in the terms of service that the restaurant “may disclose your communications and activities using the Wi-Fi System in response to lawful requests by governmental authorities.”
Justice Stephen Bushong took a position of partially dissenting in the case, writing that the gathering of De Witt Simons’ activity would be a search under a commonsense understanding of the word.
“But it would be an unreasonable search, because a warrant was required for the police to engage in continued surveillance to discover the specific information that defendant had accessed via the internet,” he wrote.
An interview request made to the district attorney was not immediately returned. A press release from the office called the case “fatally compromised” after the loss of the activity log, which made it decide to drop the case.
A search of the Oregon Department of Corrections’ offender database shows that, as of April 6, 2026, De Witt Simons is still incarcerated at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla.
