C.A. 4th;
D072171

The Fourth Appellate District granted a petition for writ of mandate. The court held that a criminal defendant did not have the right to compel Facebook to disclose the potentially exculpatory contents of a user's private account.

Lance Touchstone was charged with the attempted murder of Jeffrey R. While awaiting trial, Touchstone served Facebook, Inc. with a subpoena for the subscriber records and non-public contents of the victim's Facebook account, including timeline posts, messages, phone calls, photos, videos, location information and user-input information from account inception to the present. Touchstone believed that the victim, who was very active on his Facebook account, might have posted information that would prove exculpatory.