>>As the linked article said - does locking your front door show criminal intent? Does denying a police officer (without a warrant) access to search your home demonstrate criminal intent?>>
Absent other factors, probably not. Add in other evidence, encyption software or door locks may be relavent evidence. I would first make the distinction between searches (probable cause necessary and totality of circumstances in a general sense serving as the basis) and the concept of intent in the context of proving a criminal case (case already pending).
As for the search issue, let's use the lock example. If my neighbor's house has 7 deadbolt locks on the door, I might think they are weird, but in and of itself it means nothing. Add in some facts like frequent visitors with out of state plates who visit for less than 5 minutes and hundreds of empty packages of pseudophed left for the trash each week, along with empty 10 gallon pails of ether. Police conduct a surveillance of the exterior and confirm these findings over a period of time. For this argument's sake, the officers have specific training in patterns of behavior of illegal drugs. This would likely be sufficient for a search warrant. Psuedophed and ether are component parts of methamphetamine production, drug dealers are often concerned for their safety and use locks and surveillance equipment, and frequent short duration visitors are typical MO of street level drug sales.
As for intent, lets look at a child sex type case. This is a slightly altetred fact scenario of a case one of my colleagues recently prosecuted. Parents of an 11 year old girl get suspicious of said girl's secretive computer use and they start reading her email's. They note that she is corresponding with a person who is 25 years her senior based on his internet provider profile. Some of the emails are sexually explicit. They alert local authorities who set up a meeting with this gentleman , after they continue to correspond with him, pretending to be the aforementioned little girl.
He is arrested for several crimninal charges when he arrives at that meeting. Based on that arrest and the original fact pattern, a judge issues a search warrant for the guy's computer. The original emails are an instrumentality of the crime. On forensic exam of this computer, encryption software along with 5,000 images of child porn were found.
Does that factor into his intent. Surely it does. Combine evidence of his prediliction for child porn, software attempting to conceal it, with the correspondence with a minor child, roll of duct tape and liquid sedative type medication found in his car at the time of the meeting and a reasonable jury can glean intent from those factors viewed in their totality.
Just having encyption software or guns or locks does not mean intent, but put in appropriate evidentiary context, intent can be gleaned from the existence of those items when combined with other factors.
Intent is a concept that is difficult to view in an isolated vaccum. It is a legal concept that is highly fact dependent.
