Appeals court finds FBI did violate rights of some Beverly Hills safe-deposit box holders
LOS ANGELES — The FBI violated people’s constitutional rights when it opened and “inventoried” the contents of hundreds of safe-deposit boxes during a raid on a Beverly Hills vault in 2021, a federal appellate court ruled Tuesday.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a lower court decision in favor of the FBI. The panel found that the agency’s cataloging of the contents of the privately rented boxes, without individual criminal warrants for each, violated the box holders’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The ruling requires federal officials to destroy any inventory records they have kept on hundreds of box holders who have otherwise been found faultless and had
