United States v. Sheehan
| Docket Number | 21-1983 |
| Decision Date | 08 June 2023 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Derek SHEEHAN, Defendant, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit |
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS [Hon. Richard G. Stearns, U.S. District Judge]
Robert L. Sheketoff, with whom Sheketoff & O'Brien was on brief, for appellant.
Donald C. Lockhart, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Rachael S. Rollins, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.
Before Barron, Chief Judge, Selya and Lynch, Circuit Judges.
Defendant-appellant Derek Sheehan appeals both the district court's refusal to suppress the seizure of his cell phone and its refusal to suppress evidence of child pornography. We conclude that the seizure of the cell phone was lawful, but that the warrant authorizing the search of his electronic devices containing the child-pornography evidence was neither supported by probable cause nor within the good-faith exception to the warrant requirement. Accordingly, we affirm in part and reverse in part the district court's denial of Sheehan's motion to suppress, vacate both Sheehan's conviction and his conditional guilty plea, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
When reviewing the disposition of a motion to suppress, "[w]e rehearse the facts as supportably found by the district court," supplementing those facts (as may be necessary) "with uncontested facts drawn from the broader record." United States v. Adams, 971 F.3d 22, 28 (1st Cir. 2020). With this standard in mind, we first canvass the relevant facts and then trace the travel of the case.
On June 28, 2018, a woman reported to police in Norwell, Massachusetts, that Sheehan had sexually assaulted her younger brother, who was a friend of Sheehan's son. A seven-week investigation followed, during which state and local police conducted a series of interviews with several children and their parents, all of whom were apparently acquainted with Sheehan and his family.
From those interviews, the police learned of an elaborate ruse through which Sheehan ostensibly had attempted to dispel or preempt any suspicions the other parents might have had that he was a pedophile. In a series of interviews, the parents independently told a similar tale: that Sheehan had earlier said that he had been the subject of a state police investigation after text messages between two children describing him as a pedophile had been unearthed by administrators at the children's school.
According to the parents, Sheehan said that the investigation had exonerated him. In support, he showed them what purported to be both a state police file and an email exchange between him and the school resource officer. The parents described the supposed police file as being hundreds of pages in length and imprinted with the emblem of the Massachusetts State Police. But all of this was made up out of whole cloth: unbeknownst to the parents, Sheehan had never before been either the subject or the target of any such investigation.
Police officers also learned that Sheehan had created an "Apple ID" account for the child he had allegedly assaulted.1 By creating such an account, Sheehan was able to monitor that child's text messages, pictures, and videos. Indeed, the police were told that Sheehan had used a desktop computer in his home to spy on that child's text messages. One of those messages, sent to another child in January of 2018, described Sheehan as a "literal child rpst [sic]."
On August 1, 2018, police officers tried to interview Sheehan at his home. Because he was not there at the time, they instead spoke to his wife. She denied ever having seen the state police file described by the other parents. Before leaving, though, the officers informed her that Sheehan was under investigation.
On August 16, one of the parents called the Norwell police to report that Sheehan and his wife had spoken to her by telephone a few days earlier. Their stated intention was to deter her from cooperating with the investigation. They told her, among other things, that the police were dissembling about Sheehan and could not be believed. In that conversation, Sheehan also told the parent that she should inform the police that he had done nothing wrong.
That evening, a Norwell police officer, Kayla Puricelli, applied for a search warrant. The application expressly incorporated by reference an attached affidavit, which described the evidence gathered by the police during their interviews with the parents and children. Additionally, the affidavit referred to evidence, obtained by state police, that Sheehan had created two email accounts. He created one such account in the name of the school resource officer, and he created the other in the name of the child whom he had allegedly assaulted.
Based on those facts, the affidavit stated that there was probable cause to believe that Sheehan had committed the crimes of identity fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, witness intimidation, and impersonation of a police officer. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 266, §§ 37E, 120F, ch. 268, §§ 13B, 33. To obtain additional evidence of those crimes, the affidavit (and thus the warrant application) sought authorization to seize, and subsequently search, any electronic devices found within Sheehan's home that could transmit or store digital data, including cell phones. An assistant clerk of the Hingham District Court issued the warrant (with docket number 1858SW0035), which authorized the search of Sheehan's house and person, but not the search of any other person within the home.
The following morning — wielding an arrest warrant separately obtained by the Massachusetts State Police — officers arrested Sheehan for indecent assault and battery of a child under the age of fourteen, see Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 265, § 13B, and witness intimidation, see id. ch. 268, § 13B. The officers then searched Sheehan's home pursuant to the warrant obtained by Officer Puricelli, seizing myriad electronic devices in the process.2
Sheehan's wife had his cell phone in her possession at the time of the search. While his arrest was taking place, Sheehan asked his wife to call a lawyer. That is when the arresting officers seized the phone: in Sheehan's words, one of the officers "grabbed [his] wife by the arm, twisted her arm[,] and removed the phone from her hand."3
Shortly thereafter, state prosecutors moved to impound the search warrant because it contained information that could possibly identify juvenile victims of sexual assault. On August 20, a justice of the Hingham District Court granted the motion.
On August 29, Officer Puricelli applied for a second search warrant, this time seeking to search the electronic devices seized from Sheehan's home for evidence of possession of child pornography. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 29C. Like the first warrant application, the second expressly incorporated an attached affidavit. In that affidavit, Officer Puricelli stated that because she had submitted the affidavit "for the limited purpose of securing a search warrant," she had refrained from including "each and every fact known to [her] concerning th[e] investigation." Instead, the affidavit "set forth only those facts that [she] believe[d] [were] sufficient to establish the requisite probable cause for a search warrant."
The affidavit then recounted, in pertinent part, that a seven-week police investigation had culminated in the issuance of an arrest warrant for Sheehan and a search warrant for his home (both of which were executed on August 17). The electronic devices seized in that search were then taken into custody by the Massachusetts State Police Computer Crimes Unit. A state trooper from that unit notified Officer Puricelli that — while downloading digital evidence from Sheehan's phone — he had seen "pictures he believed to be child pornography." According to the affidavit, "[t]he pictures consisted of images of prepubescent penises that lacked pubic hair." Based solely on that description and the fact of Sheehan's arrest, the second application sought a warrant to search all devices seized from Sheehan's home for evidence of possession of child pornography.
Other than stating that Sheehan had been arrested for indecent assault and battery on a child under the age of fourteen in violation of Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 265, § 13B, the second affidavit neither provided details of the alleged assault nor recounted any facts drawn from the initial investigation. By the same token, the second application did not contain copies of any of the supposedly pornographic images. And although the affidavit attached to the second application made clear that the devices to be searched had been seized pursuant to the first search warrant (which the second affidavit identified specifically by docket number), the second affidavit at no point expressly incorporated by reference the first search warrant, the application for that warrant, or the affidavit furnished in support of that application.
Officer Puricelli did state in the second affidavit that she had "previously submitted the same application relative to [the electronic devices]," but she made pellucid that the prior application had been "based on probable cause for other crimes." What is more, she stated that she had "not previously submitted the same application" as it related to the crime of possession of child pornography. (Emphasis in original). She also reiterated that distinction on the form for the second warrant application.
An assistant clerk of the Hingham District Court — albeit not the assistant clerk who approved the first warrant — authorized the search. The second warrant issued with docket number 1858SW0036. The ensuing search uncovered videos of Sheehan sexually abusing a child on three separate occasions. Based on that evidence, he was charged in state court with several offenses, including three counts of...
To continue reading
Request your trial