State of Minnesota, Respondent,

This opinion will be unpublished and
may not be cited except as provided by
Minn. Stat. § 480A.08, subd. 3 (2018).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A17-1739

State of Minnesota,
Respondent,

vs.

Justin Lee Ironhawk,
Appellant.

Filed December 24, 2018
Affirmed
Smith, Tracy M., Judge

Hennepin County District Court
File No. 27-CR-16-2763

Lori Swanson, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; and

Michael O. Freeman, Hennepin County Attorney, Kelly O’Neill Moller, Assistant County
Attorney, Minneapolis, Minnesota (for respondent)

Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appe llate Public Defender, Anders J. Erickson, Assistant
Public Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)

Considered and decided by Ross, Presiding Judge; Johnson, Judg e ; a n d S m i t h ,
Tracy M., Judge.
U N P U B L I S H E D O P I N I O N
SMITH, TRACY M., Judge
In this direct appeal from his conviction for first-degree cri minal sexual conduct,
appellant Justin Lee Ironhawk challenges the district court’s d enial of his pretrial motion

2
to suppress evidence on the ground s that the police searched hi s cell phone without a
warrant in violation of the Four th Amendment and the correspond ing section of the
Minnesota Constitution. Because the district court did not err in determining that, even if
the phone were subject to an unc onstitutional search, an except ion to the exclusionary
rule—the independent-source doctrine—applies, we affirm.
FACTS
Late in the evening of January 16, 2016, C.S. went to the apar tment of Ironhawk’s
girlfriend to borrow a cigarette from Ironhawk. Ironhawk was dr inking at the time, and
C.S. joined him. When C.S. was going to leave, Ironhawk told he r that she could stay in
the basement. They both went to the basement and kept drinking. C.S. did not remember
falling asleep, but she found hers elf on the basement floor whe n she awoke the next
morning. Ironhawk was lying next to her, and they were both fully clothed. A few moments
later, Ironhawk’s girlfriend entered the basement, angry at seeing C.S. there. She yelled at
C.S. to leave immediately and struck C.S. with a liquor bottle. Hurriedly running out of the
apartment, C.S. mistakenly took Ironhawk’s cell phone, which was lying on the floor. C.S.
headed to her grandmother’s house.
After she got to her grandmot her’s house, C.S. plugged the cell phone into a charger
and realized that it was not hers. The phone, unlike hers, was locked with a passcode.
Believing that she had acciden tly taken Ironhawk’s phone and le ft hers at the apartment,
C.S. went back out to retrieve her phone from Ironhawk, but she was unable to locate her
phone. C.S. returned to her grandmother’s house. She tried to unlock Ironhawk’s phone by

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guessing the passcode. She put in a four-digit number affiliated with a local gang that she
knew Ironhawk “represented,” and the phone unlocked.
In the cell phone, C.S. found videos that had been recorded in the early morning
hours of that day. She knew she had been in the basement with I ronhawk at the time the
videos were recorded but did not remember any filming. In the v ideos, C.S. was lying on
the basement floor, unconscious and naked below her waist. Different objects, including a
broomstick handle and a cucumber, were being used to penetrate her both anally and
vaginally. C.S. recognized Ironhawk as the person using the obj ects because the videos
showed his hand with the word “Ironhawk” tattooed on the knuckl es. Ironhawk was also
masturbating in the videos. C.S. was in shock and disgusted. Sh e stopped watching the
videos and caused her niece to call the police.
Officers Jennifer Merrill and Ryan Carrero were dispatched in response. From the
911 call, they knew that they were responding to a report of rape and that the victim had a
video recording of the crime. Once the officers arrived, C.S. t old them what happened
starting from when she went to the apartment. But, at the point in her narrative in which
she discovered the videos, she found it emotionally hard to exp lain further. She asked the
officers to watch the videos for themselves.
C.S. pulled up one of the videos, started playing it, and hand ed the phone to the
officers for their viewing. The video, however, was too dark to see anything. The officers
handed the phone back to C.S., telling her the video was too da rk. C.S. accessed a second
video in which the officers could see a woman lying unconscious and naked from the waist
down. From this point, C.S. forwarded through the video and brought up various portions

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of it for the officers to watch. The officers held the phone at times, while, at other times,
C.S. would take back the phone and forward to a specific point in the video. The officers
saw in the video C.S., naked below the waist, being penetrated with different objects, and
a hand with distinctive tattoos manipulating the objects. One o f the officers testified that
C.S. also showed them a picture of a man on the phone, who she said was her assailant and
whose hand had identical tattoos . The officers seized the phone and referred C.S. to
Hennepin County Medical Center for a sexual-assault examination.
The police applied for a warrant to search Ironhawk’s cell pho ne. The supporting
affidavit detailed what Officers Merrill and Carrero saw in the video. It also explained the
events leading up to the officers’ viewing of the video, including that C.S. told the officers
that she believed she had been sexually assaulted overnight; th at C.S. drank alcohol with
Ironhawk the night before and was awakened by a commotion in the morning; that, in her
haste to leave, C.S. grabbed a phone that she later discovered to be Ironhawk’s; that C.S.
unlocked the phone by guessing the passcode; that C.S. found se veral videos recorded in
the early morning hours when she had been sleeping or passed out at the place of the alleged
assault; and that C.S. began to cry as she reached the part of the description of events when
she had viewed the videos and handed the phone to the officers to watch for themselves.
The warrant was issued and executed.
Ironhawk was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct . He filed a pretrial
motion to suppress evidence, ar guing that Officers Merrill and Carrero searched his cell
phone without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment wh en they watched the
videos at C.S.’s request. The district court denied the motion on the grounds that, under the

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prior-private-search doctrine, the police viewing of the videos was not a search under the
Fourth Amendment, and that, even if it was a search, the independent-source exception to
the exclusionary rule applied. Ironhawk requested reconsiderati on. After an evidentiary
hearing, the district court i ssued another order denying Ironha wk’s motion to suppress.
Following a bench trial, Ironhawk was found guilty and was subs equently convicted and
sentenced.
This appeal follows.
D E C I S I O N
“When reviewing a district court’s pretrial order on a motion to suppress evidence,
[appellate courts] review the district court’s factual findings u n d e r a c l e a r l y e r r o n e o u s
standard and the district court’s legal determinations de novo. ” State v. Gauster , 752
N.W.2d 496, 502 (Minn. 2008) (quotation omitted). Also, “an error in admitting evidence,
even if it is of constitutional magnitude, is a trial error tha t requires an assessment of
prejudice as a precondition to granting relief.” State v. Horst, 880 N.W.2d 24, 36-37 (Minn.
2016).
The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be s ecure in their
persons, houses, papers, and eff ects, against unreasonable sear ches and seizures.” U.S.
Const. amend. IV; see also Minn. Const. art. I, § 10.
1 A search for purposes of the Fourth

1 Article I, Section 10 of the Minnesota Constitution is “textua lly identical” to the Fourth
Amendment. State v. Carter, 697 N.W.2d 199, 209 (Minn. 2005). Because of the textual
similarity, the Minnesota Supreme Court does not “construe [the ] state constitution as
providing more protection for individual rights than does the f ederal constitution unless
there is a principled basis to do so.” State v. Edstrom, 916 N.W.2d 512, 523 (Minn. 2018)
(quotation omitted). We see no such principled basis in this case.

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Amendment occurs “when the government intrudes upon a person’s reasonable expectation
of privacy.” Edstrom, 916 N.W.2d at 517. And search es are presumptively unreasonabl e
when conducted without warrants. State v. Lugo, 887 N.W.2d 476, 486 (Minn. 2016). The
exclusionary rule bars admission of evidence obtained directly or indirectly due to an
unreasonable search. See State v. Lieberg , 553 N.W.2d 51, 55 (Minn. App. 1996) (citing
Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 536-37, 108 S. Ct. 2529, 2533 (1988)).
The exclusionary rule is not absolute, however. It does not ap ply if the state shows
“that the evidence was obtained ‘by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the
primary taint.’” State v. Olson, 634 N.W.2d 224, 229 (Minn. App. 2001) (quoting Wong
Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 488, 83 S. Ct. 407, 417 (1963)), review denied (Minn.
Dec. 11, 2001). The independent-source doctrine outlines one way in which the taint of a
Fourth Amendment violation is purged. Lieberg, 553 N.W.2d at 55. The doctrine allows
“introduction of otherwise illegally-seized evidence if the police could have retrieved it on
the basis of information obtain ed independent of their illegal activity.” State v. Richards,
552 N.W.2d 197, 203 n.2 (Minn. 1996).
The district court found that, even if the cell phone was the subject of an
unconstitutional warrantless search , the exclusionary rule did not apply under the
independent-source doctrine. We begin with that issue.
The district court decided th at the search of Ironhawk’s phone pursuant to the search
warrant, not a previous warrantless search, “was in fact a genuinely independent source of”
the evidence obtained. Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 542, 108 S. Ct. 2529, 2536
(1988). When an affidavit in support of a warrant application includes information that was

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obtained illegally, the district court must engage in a two-pro nged analysis to determine
whether the independent-source doctrine applies. Lieberg, 553 N.W.2d at 55. The court
must decide “(1) whether the decision of the issuing magistrate was ‘affected’ by the
tainted information, and (2) whether that information prompted law enforcement officials
to seek the warrant.” Id. We address each prong in turn.
The first prong of the independent-source analysis may be perf ormed “by
determining whether a sanitized affidavit would establish probable cause.” Id. A “sanitized
affidavit” is a redacted version of a warrant affidavit, cutting out any unlawfully obtained
information. The district court concluded that a sanitized affi davit—one that excludes the
officers’ description of the contents of the videos they saw—wo uld establish probable
cause for a warrant to search Ironhawk’s cell phone.
“When reviewing a determination of probable cause, our functio n is only to decide
whether the issuing court had a substantial basis for its decision.” Id. A substantial basis in
this context means a “fair proba bility,” given the totality of the circumstances, “that
contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.” State v. Zanter, 535
N.W.2d 624, 633 (Minn. 1995) (quotation omitted). Ironhawk argu es that no such
probability can be ascertained fro m the sanitized affidavit bec ause the sanitized affidavit
does not link the sexual assault to Ironhawk’s phone.
A c c o r d i n g t o t h e c h a i n o f e v e n t s d e t a i l e d i n t h e s a n i t i z e d a f fidavit, C.S. told
responding officers the following: (1) C.S. believed that she w as sexually assaulted
overnight at Ironhawk’s girlfriend’s residence; (2) C.S. and Ir onhawk had been drinking
alcohol together at the residence during the night and she had slept over in the basement at

8
Ironhawk’s request; (3) she did not remember anything between 3 :30 a.m. and when she
awoke at 7:00 a.m.; (4) when she awoke, she was fully clothed; (5) Ironhawk’s girlfriend
started assaulting C.S., and C.S. mistakenly grabbed someone else’s cell phone as she fled;
(6) after she realized her error, she attempted to retrieve her phone and purse, but only
recovered her purse; (7) later in the day, C.S. tried to use the cell phone, but it was locked,
so she guessed a code related t o a gang she believed Ironhawk w as part of and it opened;
and (8) C.S. then noticed there were videos on the phone from a round 4:55 a.m. that
morning, which was when she was passed out or asleep. The sanit ized affidavit further
states that “as [C.S.] told the responding officers about the incident she began to cry as she
reached the part of the descripti on of events when she looked a t the videos. [C.S] then
handed the phone to the responding officers and asked them to watch the videos.”
While the sanitized affidavit does not explicitly state that t he videos C.S. found in
the cell phone were recordings of a sexual assault, the only reasonable inference is that the
videos on the phone depicted the sexual assault. Cf. State v. Yarbrough, 828 N.W.2d 489,
491 (Minn. App. 2013) (“[I]ssui ng judge[s] may draw common-sens e and reasonable
inferences from the facts and circumstances set forth in an affidavit.”) (quotation omitted).
C.S.’s belief she had been sexua lly assaulted, her description of drinking with Ironhawk
and waking up next to him, her account of accessing the phone a nd finding videos from
when she was passed out or asleep, and her strong emotional reaction when she discussed
the videos and asked the police to watch them, together, establ ished more than a “fair
probability” that video evidence of sexual assault was in Ironh awk’s cell phone. The
district court did not err in deciding that the first prong of the Lieberg standard was met.

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Under the second prong of Lieberg, the district court must decide whether “the
police would have sought a warrant even in the absence of the i nformation generated by
the unlawful search.” Lieberg, 553 N.W.2d at 58. This is a factual determination for the
district court. Id. We do not “set aside [a district court’s findings of fact] unl ess clearly
erroneous.” State v. Evans, 756 N.W.2d 854, 870 (Minn. 2008). Findings of fact are not
clearly erroneous if there is “reasonable evidence to support the district court’s findings of
fact.” Id. (quotation omitted).
In this case, the district court decided that the police would have applied for a search
warrant for the phone even without having watched the videos th emselves, for the same
reasons it found probable cause based on the sanitized affidavi t. C.S.’s account of the
events, including taking Ironhawk’s phone; her belief she was sexually assaulted; and her
emotional reaction when she was about to describe what she saw on the videos all led the
district court to find that “the police would have obtained a w arrant to search Ironhawk’s
phone.” C.S.’s words and actions strongly suggested to the officers that there was evidence
of sexual assault in the phone. The district court did not make a clear error in finding that
the police would have sought a s earch warrant for Ironhawk’s ph one even without the
allegedly unconstitutional search. Because the district court did not err in finding that both
prongs of the Lieberg analysis are satisfied, it did not err in concluding that the
independent-source doctrine applies.
Because the independent-source doctrine applies, we need not a ddress whether the
district court erred in deciding that there was no Fourth Amend ment violation under the
prior-private-search doctrine. Eve n if the district court erred in that regard, the error did

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not prejudice Ironhawk because the exclusionary rule did not ma ndate suppression of the
evidence.
Affirmed.