"Your honor, the state agrees to not prosecute on any information inferrable from the text of the password."

"Understood. The defendant's Fifth Amendment right to protection from self-incrimination is secured. As per the prior ruling, the defendant will remain in custody for contempt of court until such time as they divulge the necessary password to comply with the warrant."

I don't know why you're being downvoted. For a start, if it was a third party that had the passcode and refused to divulge it they can be held in jail until they release it, e.g. if your wife knows it. (There are many cases where people have been sentenced to years or decades in prison for not testifying)

If it is you not divulging your own passcode, then legally the judge can't give you contempt, but in reality they could give you contempt until you fought it through the appellate court. Contempt is a special type of thing - certainly here in Illinois you have no right to a jury trial on contempt charges. You're just fucked.

I believe judges can, in fact, hold a defendant for refusing to give up their own passwords, and that the contempt could be indefinite. This is a point of law that is not settled at the federal level yet, and at the state level it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

In one case, the appellate court at the federal level simply refused to hear the case that had been decided at the sate supreme court level.

https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/us-supreme-court-nixe...

They don't actually need your passphrase to unlock your phone - they just need somebody with the passphrase to unlock in for them. And if there's any doubt about who that is, then having that passphrase counts as testimonial; but if there's not - it might not count as testimonial.

Although there are apparently a whole bunch of legal details that matter here; courts have in some cases held that defendants can be forced to decrypt a device when the mere act of being able to decrypt it is itself a foregone conclusion.

(If you want to google a few of these cases, the all writs act is a decent keyword to include in the search).

The defendant never needs to divulge the passphrase - they simply need to provide a decrypted laptop.

We really should up our game on encryption, perhaps some kind of time-based crypto rotation that inherently self-destructs rendering the data unusable if you don't authenticate with it every so often. If you are physically unable to unlock a device you can't be compelled to do so.

My passwords are so obscene it's a crime to write them down.

great, so they'll just be able to hit you with lewd charges on top of everything else they are filing.