Skip to content

Generated Source Mirror

This page is generated from the source Markdown file so it can be viewed inside the MkDocs site.

📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 2
  • Relationships: 2
  • Research debt items: 3

18 U.S.C. § 2232 — Destruction or Removal of Property to Prevent Seizure

Summary

18 U.S.C. § 2232 addresses destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure. Subsection (a) makes it a federal crime, before, during, or after a search or seizure by an authorized person, to knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take action for the purpose of preventing or impairing the government’s lawful authority to take such property into custody or control, punishable by fine or imprisonment of not more than five years, or both.1

Verified Facts

  • Cornell LII publishes the current text of 18 U.S.C. § 2232, including subsection (a) (“Destruction or Removal of Property To Prevent Seizure”).1
  • The indictment in United States v. Tunick charges a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2232(a) based on alleged deletion of digital contents of a Google Pixel phone.2

Jurisdiction: U.S. federal criminal statute. Authority level: binding statutory text. Application of § 2232(a) to deletion of phone data (as distinct from physical destruction of a device) is a case-specific legal question presented in pending litigation such as CASE-US-V-TUNICK; this page does not resolve that question.

Relationships

Sources

  1. SRC-USC-18-2232-LII: 18 U.S.C. § 2232 (Cornell LII).
  2. SRC-TUNICK-INDICTMENT-2025: United States v. Tunick — Indictment (N.D. Ga. Nov. 13, 2025).

Research Debt

  • Compare LII text to Office of the Law Revision Counsel official code.
  • Add legislative-history sources for the 2000 amendments expanding subsection (a).
  • Track appellate treatment, if any, of § 2232(a) applied to digital wipe / duress-credential theories.

Document metadata

  • Last verified: 2026-07-27

  1. SRC-USC-18-2232-LII — 18 U.S.C. § 2232 (Cornell LII). Primary statutory text (LII-hosted). ↩↩

  2. SRC-TUNICK-INDICTMENT-2025 — United States v. Tunick Indictment (N.D. Ga. Nov. 13, 2025). Charging instrument. ↩