An Allegheny County man is trying have a photo of a nude female student found on his cellphone while he worked as a guard for a private security company at Seneca Valley High School last year suppressed from evidence in his criminal case in Butler County Common Pleas Court.

A hearing was held Tuesday, Aug. 23, on the motion to suppress filed on behalf of Matthew Alan Cowan, 24, of Brackenridge, who is facing 44 felony charges filed in December 2022 by Cranberry Township police for allegedly disseminating the photo in August.

Judge Kelley Streib gave attorneys 60 days to file briefs followed by seven days to file responses.

Cowan’s attorney, Al Lindsay of Butler, argued that the photo should be suppressed because the search warrant used to obtain it is overly broad and doesn’t specify what police were looking for.

Rulings in other cases by the state Superior Court say search warrants must be specific about the information being sought, Lindsay said.

Assistant District Attorney Laura Pitchford argued that the motion should be dismissed because it was filed after the statutory deadline.

Lindsay said he didn’t receive a copy of the warrant until Tuesday morning.

The motion Lindsay filed dealt with a warrant in the dissemination case and a warrant obtained by the Jackson Township Police Department before it charged Cowan with inappropriately touching a 17-year-old female student on a trail behind the campus in August 2021 when Cowan was working as a security guard at the middle school.

In each case, the grounds for permitting the search lacked particularity, Lindsay wrote in the motion.

According to the motion, warrants issued for Verizon, Snap Inc., AT&T and Facebook seek information about the subscriber, and records of calls, texts, videos, login and logout data and picture messages between March 1 and Dec. 31 in 2021. A separate warrant issued for Facebook seeks subscriber information and login and logout data from Sept. 1, 2020, to Jan. 2, 2022.

Any evidence obtained from those warrants should be suppressed on the grounds of “overbreadth” and lacking particularity in violation of the U.S. and Pennsylvania constitutions, according to the motion.