Opinion ID: 4537137
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Motion to Suppress the NIT Warrant

Text: “On appeal from a district court’s ruling on a motion to suppress, we review the court’s factual findings for clear error.” United States v. Raymonda, 780 F.3d 105, 113 (2d Cir. 2015). “We review the court’s legal determinations, including . . . the good faith of officers relying on a search warrant, de novo.” Id. We find Safford’s challenge largely foreclosed by this Court’s opinion in United States v. Eldred, 933 F.3d 110 (2d Cir. 2019), which addressed the exact warrant at issue here and concluded that suppression was not required. As in Eldred, even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, we would “ultimately conclude that . . . the good-faith exception applies.” Id. at 115. Under this exception to the 3 exclusionary rule, evidence may be admitted if, in abiding by and executing a warrant, the agents acted with an objectively reasonable, good-faith belief that their conduct was lawful. United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 922 (1984). The exception does not apply, however, where the officer has no reasonable grounds to believe the warrant was properly issued. Id. at 923. The Eldred court squarely rejected several of the arguments Safford raises for why the exception does not apply here: namely, that the government acted deliberately, recklessly, or with gross negligence in seeking the warrant; that the warrant was so facially deficient that officers could not reasonably presume it to be valid; and that the warrant was void ab initio, rendering the good faith exception unavailable. See Eldred, 933 F.3d at 119–21. As to those arguments, Eldred controls, and we find them unpersuasive for the same reasons stated in that opinion. Safford fares no better with his argument that the good faith exception does not apply because the warrant was so deficient of probable cause that no reasonable officer could have relied on it. Showing such deficiency “is a very difficult threshold to meet.” United States v. Falso, 544 F.3d 110, 128 n.24 (2d Cir. 2008). Far from being bare-bones, the application and affidavit here detailed several objective facts supporting the existence of probable cause to believe that 4 anyone who logged into Playpen did so intending to view or trade child pornography. These included the “description of the images and text of Playpen’s homepage, the warnings regarding a user’s anonymity when a user registered an account, the nature of the Tor network” – which made it unlikely a user would come across Playpen without understanding its purpose or content – “and the content of the site.” App’x at 179–80; see United States v. Allen, 782 F. App’x 21 (2d Cir. 2019) (finding probable cause to support the NIT warrant). On these facts, we cannot say that the warrant was “so lacking in indicia of probable cause” that an officer would have “no reasonable grounds” to believe the warrant was properly issued. Leon, 468 U.S. at 923 (internal quotation marks omitted). Relatedly, we reject Safford’s contention that material misrepresentations in the application warranted a Franks hearing. Even assuming that law enforcement acted deliberately, the alleged misstatements Safford points to – that by the time the warrant issued, Playpen’s logo had changed so it no longer matched with the affidavit’s description and that the application misstated the extent to which Playpen was accessible through the traditional internet – would not have negated a finding of probable cause. See Allen, 782 F. App’x at 23 (noting that despite the new logo, “Playpen’s major defining characteristics” described in the affidavit and 5 “additional indicia supporting probable cause” remained the same (internal quotation marks omitted)). Safford advances another argument on the changed logo, which also lacks merit. He claims that the NIT warrant was an anticipatory warrant triggered when a visitor logged into the website “as described in the warrant application.” Safford’s Br. at 53. According to Safford, after the logo changed, the triggering event was rendered impossible, because the website no longer appeared as described. We find the government has the better argument and that the description of the images was provided as one factor in support of probable cause, not to identify the triggering event, which occurred upon logging into the site as identified by its URL. See Government’s Br. at 29–30.