People v. d’Estree.
2024 COA 106. No. 22CA0237. Fourth Amendment—Searches and Seizures—Search Warrants—Brute Force Attack—Exclusionary Rule—Independent Source Exception—Inevitable Discovery Exception.
October 3, 2024
Police became aware of d’Estree’s potential involvement in a homicide and arrested him. As part of their investigation, police seized d’Estree’s cell phone and searched and downloaded its contents after acquiring a search warrant. The district court concluded that the warrant lacked sufficient particularly and was a prohibited general warrant, and it suppressed the evidence gathered from the full extraction of the phone. The prosecution then obtained a second search warrant that allowed police to search the contents of the phone. D’Estree challenged the second warrant, arguing that it was not independent of the first warrant’s illegality; it relied on suppressed evidence, including the phone’s PIN code; and it did not limit the police’s search, which also exceeded the warrant’s legitimate scope. The district court found that (1) police sought the second warrant for reasons independent of information learned from the first warrant, so it met the “independent source doctrine” criteria; (2) retrieval of the PIN code through the brute force attack during execution of the first warrant did not constitute a Fourth Amendment search; and (3) discovery of the PIN code fell within the “inevitable discovery” exception to the exclusionary rule. Accordingly, the court declined to suppress the cell phone evidence gathered pursuant to the second warrant. The prosecution presented evidence collected from the phone at d’Estree’s homicide trial, including four pictures and several text messages. A jury found him guilty of first degree felony murder, second degree murder, conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery, three charges of criminal attempt to commit aggravated robbery, and two crime of violence sentence enhancers. But the district court only sentenced him for his felony murder and conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery convictions because his second degree murder and attempt to commit aggravated robbery convictions merged into his felony murder conviction. The district court then sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole for his felony murder conviction and 16 years in the custody of the Department of Corrections for the conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery conviction, served concurrently.
On appeal, d’Estree argued that the district court erred by not suppressing the evidence gathered from his phone after the second warrant was issued. He maintained that (1) police’s use of the phone’s PIN code violated the independent source doctrine, because the PIN code was discovered during the first suppressed search and was improperly used in the second warrant; (2) collection of the PIN code through a brute force attack was a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment; and (3) the inevitable discovery doctrine does not apply. Here, police obtained d’Estree’s phone pursuant to the first search warrant. Police expert Fink testified that to access the contents of the phone, police had the US Secret Service install software on the phone that initiated a “brute force attack” (a method that tests every possible combination of a PIN code). The software successfully extracted all the information from d’Estree’s phone, which Fink then provided to detectives. While the second warrant itself satisfies the independent source doctrine exception, police then used the PIN code, which was illegally obtained information from the first warrant, in executing the second warrant. And the use of a brute force attack to access a phone’s PIN code without a defendant’s cooperation or consent is a search protected by the Fourth Amendment. Further, though there is a reasonable probability that police software would have eventually produced d’Estree’s PIN code, it is speculative whether this would have occurred before his trial, so the inevitable discovery doctrine does not apply. Therefore, police violated d’Estree’s Fourth Amendment rights; the district court erred in allowing the evidence; and the error was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
The convictions were reversed and the case was remanded for a new trial.