Saunders

*4 Petitioner Ryan Saunders, who worked as a custodial officer in the county jail, was accused of eight misdemeanor counts of violating Penal Code section 13304, for his alleged unauthorized access, receipt, or possession of local summary criminal information. The People alleged by complaint that Saunders had illegally accessed a county criminal-information database-CJIC-and passed protected information to people associated to a Hell's Angels motorcycle gang.

As part of pre-filing investigation in 2015, law enforcement, namely the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, which also employed Saunders as a custodial officer in the jail, sought and obtained a search warrant for his personal cell-phone records. The warrant sought a broad swath of information, including but not limited to text-message content for a two-and-a-half-year period of time. The search warrant was executed and the third-party service provider, Verizon, complied by producing Saunders's cell-phone records, and placing them in the hands of the Sheriff's Office as the prosecuting law enforcement agency.

*5 After the misdemeanor complaint was filed, the People determined that Saunders's cell-phone records were not…