The sergeant noted that Carmody’s LinkedIn account listed him as a “Freelance Videographer/ Communications Manager” for the USO’s Bay Area chapter. But he omitted Carmody’s reporting credentials listed on the same Web page. Carmody had also been credentialed by the San Francisco Police Department as a member of the press.

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The sergeant testified last week that he did not know Carmody was a journalist, according to an ABC affiliate in San Francisco.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Rochelle East granted the warrant to search and monitor Carmody’s cellphone, one of a handful of warrants that were issued in the case. East now says it never should have been granted.

The police raid on Carmody’s home and office drew wide condemnation, making the politically liberal San Francisco Bay area an unlikely flash point in the debate about press freedom. California’s shield law protects reporters from disclosing their notes and confidential sources.

Police first called Carmody a suspect in their investigation but later apologized after days of uproar.

But Carmody is still fighting in court to have the four warrants that were opened in the police investigation quashed.

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The disclosures Tuesday showed, in response to political pressure, the lengths to which police went in their hunt for the source of the leaked file. The affidavit described how closely officers watched, for example, as the police report about Adachi’s death was made by public by multiple local news outlets who are believed to have worked with Carmody.

The sergeant said he compared a video clip from a local television station that showed a hand flipping through the report to images on the Internet of Carmody, noting that Carmody was pictured wearing a watch that looked similar. He wrote that he believes that a police officer had leaked the report to Carmody.

Police spokesman Michael Andraychak said the department was conducting its own investigation into the execution of the search warrants, as well as the release of the police report. He said the department was also reviewing its protocols for dealing with the news media.

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“The police department didn’t tell the judge what it knew and what it should have told the judge before it got the search warrant to rummage through Bryan Carmody’s phone records,” David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. “The other thing that struck me was the extreme nature of the invasiveness here — how far the government went to get records from a journalist that it’s not entitled to have under CA law.”

Carmody declined to comment, citing the pending court hearings in the case, but said in a brief interview that he was back to work. He said that he had retrieved the equipment police had seized but had yet to start using it again at the recommendation of digital security experts.

The case has clouded the death of Adachi, a beloved public defender and frequent critic of the police who died suddenly in February. The police report, which included unflattering details about his last hours — he was with a woman who was not his wife and was found unresponsive in an apartment with “an unmade bed, empty bottles of alcohol, cannabis gummies, and two syringes that may have been left by paramedics” — quickly became the subject of news reports after it was apparently leaked.

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Carmody, a freelance reporter and videographer who prowls the city for news — crashes, homicides, disasters — after hours and then sells the materials he gathers to local news stations, obtained the report from a source. And he has been caught in the middle, as a who’s who of city officials in San Francisco demanded an investigation into the report’s leak. Even after the raid, many city officials seemed hesitant to condemn the move.