U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied the motions to suppress filed by Sebastian Pinto-Thomaz and Jeremy Millul in their prosecution for securities fraud. During the investigation of the case, agents obtained a warrant for Pinto-Thomaz's Apple iCloud account. That warrant "contained an apparent internal inconsistency in its text" because it placed a time limit of between March 8 and 20, 2016, on some information to be provided, but not on all information. The agent who swore to the warrant affidavit didn't alert Apple to the time limit when he discussed the production with Apple employees. In his order, Judge Rakoff noted, "In response to the iCloud Warrant, Apple produced messages outside of the scope of the time limit for message content." The agent then reviewed the material produced and, based on his misunderstanding, marked as responsive all items created between March 1 and June 30, 2016. Upon learning of the error, the government agreed not to offer into evidence any of the messages seized outside the date limitation, but Pinto-Thomaz argued that all the seized evidence should be suppressed. Judge Rakoff denied that request, finding "no grounds for imposing the 'extreme remedy' of blanket suppression." He noted, "The executing agent did not 'grossly exceed' the terms of the warrant, which generally authorized widespread seizure of a number of broadly defined categories of evidence." As for Millul, he argued the agents obtained his iPhone passcode in violation of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. After lengthy analysis, Judge Rakoff found "no grounds for suppression," because it was unclear at the time of the questioning regarding the passcode whether Millul had invoked his right to remain silent or to seek counsel.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
We operate a free-to-view policy, asking only that you register in order to read all of our content. Please login or register to view the rest of this article.