Yeah, so caveat emptor: the legal system isn't something you can hack like a computer...

But...

The issue at hand is the "locality" of the encryption header. He merely facilitated its deletion, not the data.

If he had a backup at home, is that still a felony?

What about if he had a backup on a flash drive with him?

What if he never had the header on the phone to begin with and used a detached header on a flash drive?

Are detached headers (a thing you can easily do with LUKS) now de-facto illegal?

This whole thing is making me feel rather uneasy about the bigger picture.