Seeking HIV test created acceptance of risk of disclosure to law enforcement under HIPAA

Defendant was charged with exchanging body fluids while HIV positive, and he challenged the release of medical information under state law and HIPAA. The Idaho Supreme Court held that the defendant assumed the risk of delivery of his HIV records to law enforcement when he sought the lab tests under HIPAA. State v. Mubita, 145 Idaho 925, 188 P.3d 867 (2008):

The State asserts the district court correctly held that Mubita lacked standing to assert a search and seizure violation with regard to his health records because he voluntarily released the records to a third party. The State relies upon United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435, 96 S. Ct. 1619, 48 L. Ed. 2d 71 (1976), and State v. Kluss, 125 Idaho 14, 867 P.2d 247 (Ct. App. 1993), to argue that Mubita had no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turned over to a third party. The State points out that Mubita voluntarily turned over the laboratory results in order to obtain the Health Department’s HIV-related services. The additional documents that Mubita executed to obtain Health Department services were the Health Department’s own records. As such, he has no standing to claim a Fourth Amendment violation based on the Health Department’s disclosure of these records.

Forty minute lost of sight of defendant during pursuit extinguished hot pursuit. State v. Ballou, 145 Idaho 840, 186 P.3d 696 (App. 2008):

In this case, the state acknowledges that it was forty minutes between the time the officers lost sight of Ballou and the time they knocked on his apartment door. Additionally, like the facts of Johnson [United States v. Johnson, 256 F.3d 895, 908 (9th Cir. 2001)], these forty minutes were not spent waiting for reinforcements. Rather, the officers spent this time knocking on the doors of other apartments in the search for Ballou. The officers had no idea which apartment Ballou had retreated into and there was no continuous knowledge of Ballou’s whereabouts. Therefore, based on the time lapse of forty minutes and the fact that the officers did not know which apartment Ballou had entered, we conclude that the initial entry into Ballou’s apartment was not justified by the hot pursuit exception to the warrant requirement.