Michigan Supreme Court: Unrestricted phone searches violate Fourth Amendment

Several years ago I had the opportunity to observe when a detective came to a magistrate's office to petition for a search warrant. The warrant sought to search the contents of a person's phone, essentially without any limitations. The alleged crime was assault and battery on a family member. When asked "What is your probable cause that the phone is likely to contain evidence of the commission of this crime?" the detective had basically nothing to say (having put nothing to that effect in the affidavit for the search warrant) other than some vague (cooked up on the spot?) statements about the "mobile nature of our modern society and the fact that cell phones are everywhere and everyone has one." The magistrate denied the warrant, but it's a sad testament to the propensity of law enforcement to cut corners that that search warrant affidavit was far from the last one I saw that targeted the cell phone of an accused and claimed that it was necessary to search the entire contents of the phone.

That’s because law enforcement is encourage to give least amount of effort to find any kind of damning evidence that a DA can use. The detective doesn’t care about justice but instead closing the case. If I have access to your entire phone, I can use anything I find against you as probable cause whether it’s related to the crime or not.

You believe way too much in the system. They DGAF about the DV. Maybe the charge will stick, maybe it won't. Sure they like it more than a traffic ticket but it's not much more valuable to them than a DUI. People get smacked upside the head every day and it's no big deal in their world. They want to use the DV as the pretext for a fishing expedition, In their minds maybe they can nail the guy on drug dealing or whatever other more interesting and valuable crime they can find