NC Supreme Court Weighs in on State v. Terrell and Private Search Doctrine

The North Carolina Supreme Court held in State v. Terrell, _­_ N.C. __ (Aug. 16, 2019), that a private party’s limited search of a defendant’s thumb drive did not frustrate the defendant’s legitimate expectation of privacy in the entire contents of the electronic storage device. The detective who searched on the heels of the private party could not be virtually certain that he would find nothing else of significance on the device or that his search would do no more than corroborate what the private searcher had told him. Thus, the court concluded that the detective could not lawfully search additional folders on the thumb drive without a warrant after the private party turned the device over to law enforcement. Facts. The defendant lived with his long-time girlfriend, Jessica Jones, in her home. One day while the defendant was at work, Jones removed a thumb drive from his briefcase, plugged it into a computer, opened it, and began clicking through folders and sub-folders. Jones was looking for a picture of the defendant’s former housekeeper so that she could “put a face to the person” she had heard him mention. In addition to finding images of the housekeeper and other images of adult women and children, Jones discovered an image of her nine-year-old granddaughter sleeping in a bed and exposed from the waist up. Jones became upset, stopped her search, and called her daughter, the child’s mother. The two of them took the thumb drive to the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department, where [...]