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FBI OVERSTEPPED AUTHORITY IN WARRANTLESS SEARCH OF HUNDREDS OF SAFE DEPOSIT BOXES, COURT RULES
The 9th Circuit compared the searches to the “abuses of power” that “led to adoption of the Fourth Amendment in the first place."

THE FBI OVERSTEPPED its constitutional authority when agents searched hundreds of safe deposit boxes without warrants in 2021, a federal appeals court ruled. The court compared the FBI’s tactics to the kind of indiscriminate searches that led to the enactment of the Bill of Rights in the first place.

In March 2021, the FBI raided U.S. Private Vaults, a safe deposit box company in Beverly Hills, California. The company marketed its services around client anonymity and privacy, which appealed to gambling rings and drug operations, but also customers who were unable to get a deposit box at their bank or simply mistrusted banks and preferred to store their valuables elsewhere.

The FBI seized millions of dollars in cash from the deposit boxes, plus a mix of jewelry, personal effects, and documents such as wills and prenuptial agreements.

In litigation filed in federal district court in May 2021, victims of the raid argued that the FBI’s search “flagrantly” violated their Fourth Amendment rights. In October 2022, the trial judge ruled there was no Fourth Amendment violation.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision on Tuesday. The court ruled that the FBI exceeded the bounds of a warrant obtained prior to the raid, which explicitly did not authorize any “criminal search or seizure” of the boxes’ actual contents.

The FBI’s warrant application omitted key details of the raid plan, including that the special agent in charge had directed agents to open every box, preserve fingerprint evidence, inventory the contents, and have drug dogs sniff all cash.

“If there remained any doubt regarding whether the government conducted a ‘criminal search or seizure,’” the 9th Circuit ruled, “that doubt is put to rest by the fact the government has already used some of the information from inside the boxes to obtain additional warrants to further its investigation and begin new ones.”