In United States v. Hunt, --- F.4th ---, No. 23-2342 (9th Cir. 2025), the Court affirmed the district court’s orders denying Dontae Hunt’s motion to suppress, and his recusal motion, in a case in which Hunt was convicted of possession with intent to distribute fentanyl analogue, conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute and to distribute a controlled substance, unlawful possession of firearms, and laundering of monetary instruments.
The abandonment doctrine states that a person who abandons property relinquishes his expectation of privacy in that property and thus waives any Fourth Amendment challenge. But how should we apply the abandonment doctrine to digital devices that may contain a massive trove of personal information? Appellant Dontae Hunt and amici urge us to scuttle this doctrine when it comes to cellphones.We decline to do so. We follow the time-tested reasonable expectation of privacy principle while considering that today’s technology allows us to keep historically unprecedented amounts of private information in devices. When determining a person’s intent to abandon, courts should analyze the intent to abandon the device separately from the intent to abandon its data.We disagree with the district court’s ruling that Hunt lacked standing to challenge the search of his black iPhone. The record does not allow the inference that Hunt intended to abandon the phone or its contents when he dropped it after being shot five times; it shows that he fled to seek medical help. Hunt’s Fourth Amendment claim fails on the merits because federal agents obtained a warrant and searched his phone within a reasonable period.We also reject Hunt’s argument that the district court judge should have recused herself because she served as the U.S. Attorney in Oregon when her office earlier prosecuted Hunt for a different crime. A reasonable person would not question the district court judge’s impartiality. We affirm the conviction and the sentence.Even if we assume that Hunt had abandoned his black iPhone by not trying to retrieve it from the police, we cannot conclude that he also intended to abandon the data in his phone without examining all the relevant facts. Unlike the defendants in Fisher, Hunt did not willingly sell or give away his black iPhone with all its personal data still intact. See 56 F.4th at 687. Rather, he simply lost the phone during a shooting. Though he did not follow up with the police, the record does not establish that he had reason to suspect the police collected the black iPhone from the crime scene. We need not conduct a separate analysis of the stored data because we hold that Hunt did not abandon his phone.While Hunt has standing to challenge the search of the black iPhone’s data, his argument fails on the merits. Federal agents obtained a warrant to search the iPhone’s data. So Hunt can only complain that the government violated the Fourth Amendment by seizing the data for an unreasonably long period. This argument falls flat because the Eugene police acted reasonably by collecting the iPhone as evidence related to the shooting investigation and by holding it until someone claimed it.
