## Facts

- William J. Jefferson, a sitting U.S. Representative, was charged in a multi-count federal indictment alleging corruption-related offenses.
- Federal agents executed a judicially authorized search warrant at Jefferson’s residence seeking specified categories of documents.
- Agents physically seized documents they concluded were within the warrant’s scope.
- Agents also encountered other documents in plain view that they believed were not clearly seizable under the warrant.
- Instead of seizing those documents, agents took high-resolution digital photographs of them and made cursory notes reflecting their contents.
- Jefferson moved to suppress the photographs and notes, arguing they were obtained through an unlawful search and/or seizure exceeding the warrant.

## Issues

1. Whether agents violate the Fourth Amendment by photographing and taking notes of documents encountered during execution of a valid warrant when the documents are not physically seized and may be outside the warrant’s scope.
2. Whether recording the contents of documents already lawfully exposed to agents’ view constitutes an additional search or seizure because it further intrudes on a reasonable expectation of privacy.

## Decision

- The court denied Jefferson’s motion to suppress.
- The court held that photographing and note-taking of documents lawfully viewed during execution of the warrant did not constitute an unreasonable search or seizure.
- Because the agents were lawfully present and entitled to view the documents as part of the authorized search, preserving those observations through photographs and notes did not require separate Fourth Amendment justification.

## Legal Principles

- A Fourth Amendment “search” occurs when the government infringes an expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable; analysis turns on privacy rather than property concepts.
- When officers are lawfully on premises executing a valid warrant and lawfully observe materials in the course of that search, the additional step of recording what is already exposed to view ordinarily does not create a second, constitutionally distinct search.
- Photographing or writing down what officers can already lawfully see is treated as preserving lawful observations, not as an independent seizure of property or information triggering suppression.
- Suppression is unavailable absent a Fourth Amendment violation connected to the challenged evidence.

## Conclusion

Because the agents lawfully viewed the documents during execution of a valid warrant, their use of photographs and brief notes to preserve what was observed did not amount to a separate Fourth Amendment search or seizure, and the evidence was not suppressed.


United States v. Jefferson, 571 F. Supp. 2d 696 (E.D. Va. 2008)