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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 25 2020, @08:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-have-a-warrant? dept.

Just turning your phone on qualifies as searching it, court rules:

A man from Washington state was arrested in May 2019 and was indicted on several charges related to robbery and assault. The suspect, Joseph Sam, was using an unspecified Motorola smartphone. When he was arrested, he says, one of the officers present hit the power button to bring up the phone's lock screen. The filing does not say that any officer present attempted to unlock the phone or make the suspect do so at the time.

In February 2020, the FBI also turned the phone on to take a photograph of the phone's lock screen, which displayed the name "Streezy" on it. Sam's lawyer filed a motion arguing that this evidence should not have been sought without a warrant and should therefore be suppressed.

District Judge John Coughenour of the US District Court in Seattle agreed. In his ruling, the judge determined that the police looking at the phone at the time of the arrest and the FBI looking at it again after the fact are two separate issues. Police are allowed to conduct searches without search warrant under special circumstances, Coughenour wrote, and looking at the phone's lock screen may have been permissible as it "took place either incident to a lawful arrest or as part of the police's efforts to inventory the personal effects" of the person arrested. Coughenour was unable to determine how, specifically, the police acted, and he ordered clarification to see if their search of the phone fell within those boundaries.

But where the police actions were unclear, the FBI's were both crystal clear and counter to the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights, Coughenour ruled. "Here, the FBI physically intruded on Mr. Sam's personal effect when the FBI powered on his phone to take a picture of the phone's lock screen." That qualifies as a "search" under the terms of the Fourth Amendment, he found, and since the FBI did not have a warrant for that search, it was unconstitutional.

[...] Basically, he ruled, the FBI pushing the button on the phone to activate the lock screen qualified as a search, regardless of the lock screen's nature.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Tuesday May 26 2020, @02:56AM (2 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Tuesday May 26 2020, @02:56AM (#999071)

    But what if it turned out not to be locked? Aren't what they might have seen then not something they did not have a right to observe?

    Just because a door is not locked does not grant somebody permission to enter.

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  • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday May 26 2020, @03:48AM (1 child)

    by Mykl (1112) on Tuesday May 26 2020, @03:48AM (#999084)

    True. They took a risk there because I agree - if they had opened the device in an unlocked state then the well would've been poisoned.

    Probably the same situation if a cop knocked on a door and found it was actually ajar, with a huge bag of weed sitting on a table in plain view of the doorway?

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @04:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @04:20PM (#999267)

      That case would be in favor of the cop. An open door is an invitation, and there is a legal difference between inadvertantly witnessing a crime in the course of your duty and a constitutionally protected search.