On Point: 4. Cell phones

State v. Andreas W. Rauch Sharak, 2024AP469-CR, 1/16/25, District 4; case activity (including briefs)

Rauch Sharak’s appeal concerns whether Fourth Amendment safeguards are implicated when an electronic service provider (ESP) scans for and reviews digital files in an individual’s account that are flagged as child pornography; and when law enforcement subsequently opens and views any flagged files that the ESP sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

State v. Michael Joseph Gasper, 2023AP2319, 10/30/24, District 2 (recommended for publication); case activity (including briefs)

The circuit court held that an officer’s warrantless inspection of a cyber tip digital video file provided to the officer and identified as child pornography by a private internet service provider constituted an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The COA concludes that Gasper did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the video, which he uploaded to Snapchat in violation of the terms of service and reverses.

Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy has posted an essay on a recent federal district court decision regarding the legality of so-called “geofence” warrants, which involve law enforcement getting access to Google’s cell phone location data and using the data to advance a criminal investigation. Google apparently imposes its own sort of “warrant” requirement, and the basic questions in the case, United States v. Chatrie, involve whether the request for the data is a Fourth Amendment search at all,

State v. Lamondo D. Turrubiates, 2020AP233, 11/23/21, District 3 (one-judge decision; ineligible for publication); case activity (including briefs)

Police arrested Turrubiates and the state charged him with several counts having to do with an alleged assault on his girlfriend. During the arrest police took his phone. The state came to believe the phone might contain evidence of crimes by Turrubiates, and it moved the circuit court to compel him to provide his passcode, despite the fact that it had not yet obtained a warrant to search the phone. See Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 401 (2014). The court ordered Turrbiates to provide the passcode and he refused; it then found him in contempt of court and ordered him jailed until he reveals the code (though it stayed this sanction pending appeal).

State v. George Steven Burch, 2021 WI 68, on certification from the court of appeals, affirming the judgment of conviction; case activity (including briefs)

We said in our post on the court of appeals’ certification that this case presented novel and important issues about searches of cell phones and their data. So we anticipated a decision addressing the parameters of police searches of digital devices. But the majority doesn’t address those issues or decide whether Burch’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated. Instead, the majority holds that, regardless of the lawfulness of the search of Burch’s cell phone data, “there was no police misconduct to trigger application of the exclusionary rule.” (¶26). The majority’s approach bodes ill for the future of Fourth Amendment litigation and the freedom the Fourth Amendment is intended to protect—as illustrated by this case, given that a majority of the justices (one concurring, three dissenting) concludes the search of Burch’s phone data violated the Fourth Amendment.

State v. George Steven Burch, 2019AP404-CR, certification granted 11/18/20; case activity (including briefs)

Issues presented (from the certification):

Did police violate Burch’s Fourth Amendment rights by:

1. exceeding the scope of Burch’s consent to search his cell phone by downloading the phone’s entire contents, rather than only the text messages;
2. unlawfully retaining the entire cell phone download after it completed its initial investigation and closing the case without charging Burch; and
3. unlawfully conducting a second search of the cell phone download months after closing the initial investigation.

State v. George Steven Burch, 2019AP404-CR, District 3 (10/20/20), review granted 11/18/20, circuit court judgment affirmed, 2021 WI 68; case activity (including briefs)

Burch … contends the [Green Bay Police Department] and the [Brown County Sheriff’s Office] violated his Fourth Amendment rights in three ways: (1) the GBPD exceeded the scope of his consent to search his cell phone by downloading the phone’s entire contents, rather than only the text messages; (2) the GBPD unlawfully retained the entire cell phone download after it completed its June 2016 investigation into the vehicle incidents; and (3) the BCSO had no lawful authority to conduct a second search of the cell phone download in August 2016. Because these issues raise novel questions regarding the application of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to the vast array of digital information contained in modern cell phones, we certify this appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Last June in Carpenter v. United States, SCOTUS held that phone users have a 4th Amendment right to historical cell site location records. Prof. Orin Kerr has a new paper out about how to implement Carpenter. Click here.  But why stop reading there? You can also read Prof.  Alan Rozenshtein’s new paper on 4th Amendment reasonableness after Carpenter here.

Kerr’s latest post considers 2 recent federal district court decisions on this subject. One raises the question of whether, under the 5th Amendment, the government may compel a suspect to enter a passcode to unlock his device.  The other considers whether the government may use a passcode obtained from a suspect in violation of Miranda to unlock his phone. Read the full post here.

Question presented:

Whether the warrantless seizure and search of historical cell phone records revealing the location and movements of a cell phone user over the course of 127 days is permitted by the Fourth Amendment.