No. 21-1983

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Appellee,

v.

DEREK SHEEHAN,

Defendant, Appellant.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

[Hon. Richard G. Stearns, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Barron, Chief Judge, Selya and Lynch, Circuit Judges.

Robert L. Sheketoff, with whom Sheketoff & O'Brien was on brief, for appellant. Donald C. Lockhart, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Rachael S. Rollins, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.

June 8, 2023 SELYA, Circuit Judge. Defendant-appellant Derek Sheehan appeals both the district court's refusal to suppress the seizure of his cell phone and its refusal to suppress evidence of child pornography. We conclude that the seizure of the cell phone was lawful, but that the warrant authorizing the search of his electronic devices containing the child-pornography evidence was neither supported by probable cause nor within the good-faith exception to the warrant requirement. Accordingly, we affirm in part and reverse in part the district court's denial of Sheehan's motion to suppress, vacate both Sheehan's conviction and his conditional guilty plea, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I

When reviewing the disposition of a motion to suppress, "[w]e rehearse the facts as supportably found by the district court," supplementing those facts (as may be necessary) "with uncontested facts drawn from the broader record." United States v. Adams, 971 F.3d 22, 28 (1st Cir. 2020). With this standard in mind, we first canvass the relevant facts and then trace the travel of the case.

A

On June 28, 2018, a woman reported to police in Norwell, Massachusetts, that Sheehan had sexually assaulted her younger brother, who was a friend of Sheehan's son. A seven-week

- 2 - investigation followed, during which state and local police conducted a series of interviews with several children and their parents, all of whom were apparently acquainted with Sheehan and his family.

From those interviews, the police learned of an elaborate ruse through which Sheehan ostensibly had attempted to dispel or preempt any suspicions the other parents might have had that he was a pedophile. In a series of interviews, the parents independently told a similar tale: that Sheehan had earlier said that he had been the subject of a state police investigation after text messages between two children describing him as a pedophile had been unearthed by administrators at the children's school.

According to the parents, Sheehan said that the investigation had exonerated him. In support, he showed them what purported to be both a state police file and an email exchange between him and the school resource officer. The parents described the supposed police file as being hundreds of pages in length and imprinted with the emblem of the Massachusetts State Police. But all of this was made up out of whole cloth: unbeknownst to the parents, Sheehan had never before been either the subject or the target of any such investigation.

- 3 - Police officers also learned that Sheehan had created an "Apple ID" account for the child he had allegedly assaulted.1 By creati