That judge's behavior and (the laws that enables it) is sickening. You either have enough evidence to convict a person, or you don't.
> At the contempt hearing, the Government presented several witnesses to support its prima facie case of contempt. Doe’s sister testified to the fact that, while in her presence, Doe accessed child pornography files on his Mac Pro computer by means of entering passwords from memory. Further, a detective who executed the original search warrant stated that Doe did not provide his password at the time because he wanted to prevent the police from accessing his computer. Doe never asserted an inability to remember the passwords at that time.
If the defendant wanted to argue that he no longer remembered the password (but would be willing to decrypt the drive if he could), then that's something that the judge would consider. But a judge can't (and won't) simply say "Oh, maybe he hasn't complied because he just forgot the password. I'm going to let him off"
Witnesses (in the sense of being called to that stand in a courtroom) are frequently asked to tell the court what they saw/heard/did, or from where/whom they received information. Refusing to answer may get them pulled up on contempt charges, and if they claim not to remember then the judge needs to decide whether they are lying.
Given the impossibility of proving (in an absolute sense) that the witness does in fact remember (at that exact moment), it's a game that witnesses are likely to get away with (hence the standard "I don't recall" answer from politicians and beuracrats), but it's not a universal solution to the "I don't want to tell you" scenario.
However, if that was the case then they wouldn't need to decrypt the drives, so this whole case smells quite a bit.
AFAIK there is a similar situation in the airport immigration; if you are an US citizen and don't want to provide a password for an encrypted device, they'll make you have a bad time, then throw the device and then let you in. Same for foreigners except with a flight back instead of letting them in. The bad time they give you basically depends on the immigration officer.
For SSD's it'd be as simple as an automatic single pass overwrite and a new encryption key. For HDD, the hyper-paranoid could rig their drives with small explosives to fracture the platters.
There are other solutions though, and of course you can make your own if you feel confident about it.
Innocence until proven guilty. I don't want to live in a society where law is determined by emotions and personal bias, even if some criminals end up escaping justice.
Side note: I can't believe I feel the need to state this, but evidently it needs to be stated (from comments in this thread): these two drives where set up as part of a backup solution. They contain my personal data. They do not contain child pornography.
The prosecution was able to convince a judge that there is encrypted child pornography on those drives. The judge can't force a jury to accept that (a ruling of fact), but (s)he can make a ruling of law that the defendant no longer has a fifth amendment defense to producing a decrypted version of those drives.