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SALT LAKE CITY — A United Fire Authority employee has filed a motion to suppress evidence he believes was unlawfully gathered and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Paramedic Ryan Pyle was charged with prescription fraud after an investigation into missing morphine led a Cottonwood Heights police detective to search medical records as part of his investigation.
“Nobody was ever charged with the theft of the morphine,” legal director of the ACLU of Utah John Mejia said. “That was not the basis for the charges against that paramedic. He was charged with suspected prescription fraud.”
Last year, several vials of morphine in ambulances based at three fire stations were found empty. United Fire Authority employees who made this discovery called the police. A Cottonwood Heights Police Department detective searched prescription histories of UFA employees, trying to make a connection.
The detective logged into the Utah controlled substances database to download prescription histories of all 480 UFA employees. Utah does not require police to get a warrant before accessing this sensitive health data. He then identified four people whom he deemed dependent on opioid (psychoactive chemicals such as morphine or other opiates) painkillers, and had them charged with prescription fraud.
“The evidence gathered against this paramedic should be excluded from the proceedings, and if this evidence is excluded they have no case,” Mejia said. “The Fourth Amendment requires individualized suspicion that somebody is committing a crime. Had the investigator developed some sort of suspicion against any particular firefighter and then sought a warrant and then gone after this private, sensitive medical information in that way, we might not be here because that’s the way the Fourth Amendment is supposed to work.”
Mejia said that he suspects all employees, including receptionists and others who would not have a chance to access the morphine, had their records accessed and combed over during the investigation.
“That is exactly the kind of general warrant and suspicionless search that the Fourth Amendment, Utah’s Constitution for that matter, were meant to protect us from,” Mejia said.
