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Indiana's Supreme Court has ruled [eff.org] that the Fifth Amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her iPhone. The court held that the Fifth Amendment's rule against self-incrimination protected Katelin Seo from giving the police access to potentially incriminating data on her phone.

The courts are divided on how to apply the Fifth Amendment in this kind of case. Earlier this year, a Philadelphia man was released from jail after four years of being held in contempt [arstechnica.com] in connection with a child-pornography case. A federal appeals court rejected his argument that the Fifth Amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock hard drives found in his possession. A Vermont federal court [arstechnica.com] reached the same conclusion in 2009—as did a Colorado federal court [arstechnica.com] in 2012, a Virginia state court [arstechnica.com] in 2014, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court [arstechnica.com] in 2014.

But other courts in Florida [arstechnica.com], Wisconsin [arstechnica.com], and Pennsylvania [arstechnica.com] have reached the opposite conclusion, holding that forcing people to provide computer or smartphone passwords would violate the Fifth Amendment.

Lower courts are divided about this issue because the relevant Supreme Court precedents all predate the smartphone era. To understand the two competing theories, it's helpful to analogize the situation to a pre-digital technology.

Continued on Ars Technica [arstechnica.com].

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