Comment by xg15

You're making two arguments here, and I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think any of them would convince a judge.

> The owner provides a combination that opens the safe, but the safe’s security mechanism first destroys its contents. The police can now inspect the safe but there are no documents left.

> This person was complicit with the search: he gave the police access to search the safe.

The problem is that it's very obvious the police didn't want access to the safe because they like opening safes but to get the documents inside. The person denied that intent.

> ... written in a code that only the owner understands.

> Even if the documents had remained, they would still have been written in an indecipherable code unless the police also had the codebook.

This is an orthogonal argument basically saying "if the documents had also been encrypted, then there would have been no difference between destroying the documents and just leaving them encrypted".

First, that's not what was the case in the original situation - there is nothing saying there was secondary encryption on the phone.

Second, obviously, destroying documents and encrypting them is not equivalent because in the second case there is still an option to try and brute-force the code or try to decrypt them in another way.