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Date: 07-08-2022

Case Style:

United States of America v. Eric Hill

Case Number: 3:20-cr-0329

Judge: James Donato

Court: United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco County)

Plaintiff's Attorney: United States Attorney’s Office

Defendant's Attorney:



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Description: San Francisco, California criminal defense lawyer represented defendant charged with robbery affecting interstate commerce.


On November 21, 2018, two armed men wearing masks and hoods absconded with over 1,000 prescription pills, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, from a Walgreens pharmacy in San Francisco. Dkt. No. 93-1 ¶ 22-23 (cell phone warrant affidavit). On December 6, 2018, and December 18, 2018, defendants Svarda and Hill, respectively, were arrested and charged for the incident based on a video recording that allowed San Francisco Police Department officers to identify them by their clothing and the cars used to leave the scene. Id. ¶ 22. When Hill was arrested, SFPD officers found a firearm, and a jacket and shoes matching those worn by one of the men during the incident. Id. ¶ 24. Hill also had a cell phone in his possession. Id.

Prior to Hill's arrest, SFPD investigators had obtained a search warrant for cell-site location and related information, which showed that Hill's cell phone was in the area of the Walgreens at the time of the incident. Id. SFPD officers seized Hill's cell phone, and on January 2, 2019, obtained a California state warrant to access its contents. Dkt. No. 93-3.

After searching the cell phone pursuant to the warrant, the SFPD investigators sought and obtained a state search warrant for the hill__@gmail.com Google account on February 8, 2019. Dkt. No. 93-4. The state warrant was based on the search of the cell phone, which had disclosed the email address hill__@gmail.com.[1] Id. at 5.

The evidence from the cell phone is said to show that Hill called Svarda on the morning of the robbery, and that Hill and Svarda exchanged text messages on the morning of the robbery, and texts about selling drugs, including the types of pills stolen from the Walgreens. Dkt. No. 96 at 2. The contents of the Google accounts are said to show that Hill was in the area of the Walgreens at the time of the robbery and that his path after the robbery was the same as the path of a car leaving the scene. Id.

This is not Hill's first motion to suppress. Hill originally asked to suppress the state cell phone and Google warrants, and all evidence obtained in connection with them. See Dkt. No. 46. The main objections were that the warrants were overbroad and lacked sufficient particularity. Id. at 5-7 (phone warrant); id. at 7-9 (Google warrant). The Court held a non-evidentiary hearing on the suppression request, and expressed the tentative view that the affidavits for the state warrants were thin, particularly with respect to Google. See Dkt. No. 58. The Court did not issue a final decision on the matter because federal investigators from the Drug Enforcement Administration sought a federal warrant for the phone, which was granted by a magistrate judge on May 7, 2021. Dkt. No. 93-1. The Court concluded that this mooted the prior suppression motion. See Dkt. No. 72.

In June 2021, DEA agents subpoenaed Google for information about accounts associated with Hill's cell phone number. Dkt. No. 93-14. Google's response identified jimj__@gmail.com as an account associated with Hill's phone number. Dkt. No. 93-16. Google also produced subscriber information for that account, which identified hill__@gmail.com as the recovery email for the jimj__@gmail.com account. Dkt. No. 93-15. The DEA agents subsequently sought a federal warrant for the hill__@gmail.com Google account, which was issued on September 29, 2021. Dkt. No. 93-2.

In the present motion, Hill says that the second round of federal warrants was irredeemably tainted by information unlawfully acquired from the state warrants. In effect, Hill says that once the investigators saw the contents of the cell phone and the Google information, the federal applications were necessarily the fruits of a poisonous tree. Hill also says that the government did not seek the federal warrants until approximately two years after the seizure of the cell phone, which he believes invalidates the warrants, and renews a prior objection that the scope of the Google warrant was overbroad. See Dkt No. 92 at 15-19. He requested a hearing under Franks v. Delaware on the contention that both federal warrant applications contained materially false statements or omitted material information. Id. at 20-23.
United States v. Hill (N.D. Cal. 2022)

Outcome:
Hill says that the affidavit omitted information about a search of Svarda's phone, which did not yield any communications with Hill's phone number or email. Dkt. No. 92 at 21-22. But the record indicates that investigators were unable to unlock the phone. Dkt. No. 93-7 at ECF 7. In addition, the possibility that Svarda's SIM card did not show communications with Hill would not, in itself, rule out that Hill's phone and SIM card might. Consequently, the alleged omission would not have been materially misleading to a magistrate judge reviewing the affidavit.

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