CA1: District Court erred in denying hearing on motion to suppress whether private search was exceeded

The Massachusetts Department of Social Services received information with details about access with passwords to defendant’s Sprint PCS account about how the CI accidently received child pornography from the defendant to the CI’s phone. The district court erred in denying the motion to suppress without having a hearing to determine whether the government exceeded the private search. United States v. D’Andrea, 648 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2011):

There can be no serious debate, and the government does not dispute, that defendants had a subjective expectation of privacy in their password-protected online account and that this expectation of privacy was, at least initially, reasonable. Nor is there any question that the DSS agent’s unauthorized accessing of the website constituted a warrantless search. The question presented is whether the warrantless search was nonetheless valid because an exception to the warrant requirement applied or there were circumstances defeating the reasonableness of defendants’ expectation of privacy. The government presses three theories: (1) the private search doctrine; (2) emergency intervention; and (3) inevitable discovery.

Still, the district court abused its discretion in denying a hearing on the government’s theories to support the search.