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.

It very much blows my mind, but also sadly unsurprising.

I watched a local Superior Court hearing, where a prosecutor argued against a motion to revoke bail/bond conditions. Thankfully, the Judge had a different perspective:

Prosecutor: "Because blah blah blah, and in addition, the defendant shows zero signs of taking responsibility for his actions, we..."

Judge, cutting her off: "I'm going to stop you there. The defendant entered a plea of not guilty and has not been found guilty at trial as of this moment. In the eyes of the court, the defendant has precisely zero obligation to take responsibility for alleged actions."

I was also juror on a trial for theft (stealing from an organization by the treasurer). The theft had occurred but the amount of rubber stamping was horrific. "It looks like $50K was stolen, including approximately $20K in diverted checks". In fact, the bank statements showed that no checks were diverted, and it was painfully obvious (in the statements, in some months, the checks claimed to be diverted were the -only- transactions, so it wasn't a hard find), and there was even a statement from the organization's president, taken by the Sheriff's Office, "It was later found that the checks had been deposited properly". But everyone, Sheriff, org, prosecutor had "oops, failed to remove that amount from the claimed loss", and the defendant's attorney had to bend over backwards to demonstrate this. At one point, the prosecutor had said "Demonstrate to us how you came to the number of $30K"... "Uh, if you want to claim the loss is $50K, it's on you to prove THAT. It's not on us to prove it is LESS".