United States v. Camou, No. 12-50598 (9th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CaseDefendant pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography and appealed the district court's denial of his motion to suppress images of child pornography found on his cell phone. Defendant's cell phone was searched without a warrant at a Border Patrol checkpoint's security offices. The court concluded that the search of the phone was not roughly contemporaneous with arrest and, therefore, was not a search incident to arrest given both the passage of one hour and twenty minutes between arrest and search and the seven intervening acts between arrest and search that signaled the arrest was over; the search of the cell phone is not excused under the exigency exception to the warrant exception; cell phones are non-containers for purposes of the vehicle exception to the warrant requirement and the search of defendant's cell phone cannot be justified under that exception; the inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule is not applicable in this case pursuant to United States v. Mejia; and the good faith exception is inapplicable where the government failed to assert that the agent relied on anyone or anything in conducting his search of the phone, let alone that any reliance was reasonable. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's denial of defendant's motion to suppress.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel reversed the district court’s denial of a criminal defendant’s motion to suppress images of child pornography found on his cell phone during a warrantless search. The panel held that the warrantless search of the cell phone at a Border Patrol checkpoint’s security offices was not roughly contemporaneous with the defendant’s arrest and, therefore, not a search incident to arrest, given both the passage of one hour and twenty minutes between arrest and search, and the seven intervening acts between arrest and search that signaled the arrest was over. The panel held that the search of the cell phone is not excused under the exigency exception to the warrant requirement because the government failed to show exigent circumstances that required immediate police action, and even if the exigencies permitted a search of the phone to prevent the loss of call data, the search’s scope was impermissibly overbroad. The panel held that cell phones are not containers for purposes of the vehicle exception to the warrant requirement, and that the search of the defendant’s cell phone therefore cannot be justified under that exception. The panel concluded that neither the inevitable-discovery exception to the exclusionary rule, nor the good-faith exception, applies.
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