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.

This is why you don’t talk to the police, ESPECIALLY if you’re innocent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Never to help you. If you’re guilty, and you get found guilty because you accidentally confessed, who cares, you were guilty. If you were innocent, and you accidentally confessed, that is in fact a miscarriage of justice, but the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different.

>the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different.

Seems overly cynical. How about public defenders, Miranda rights, etc.?

The US court system is set up to be adversarial. The belief is that you get the best overall outcome by having one set of people who try to convict, and another set of people who try to acquit.

One can also make the system look bad from the other direction by arguing that public defenders are terrible, because their job is to help criminals walk free. https://xcancel.com/katanaspeaks/status/1954636840272884111

You're welcome to argue against the overall concept of an adversarial court system. But the system has to be taken in total, rather than selectively focusing on one side.

The same public defenders that are unpaid and overworked to the point where they have less than 15 minutes total to work on your case while the prosecution has unlimited funds and resources?

Miranda rights don't work the way most people think they do (https://www.cgmbesq.com/blog/2022/july/the-many-misconceptio...) and courts have gone out of their way to deny people their rights.

The system is corrupt and broken from top to bottom.

>the prosecution has unlimited funds and resources?

Nope. One needs to take the system in total.

"Since New York State’s 2019 discovery reforms were passed, dismissals in cases involving domestic violence rose 26 percent in New York City. In 2023, about 94 percent of cases were dismissed in New York City and nearly 50 percent were dismissed outside of New York City. In many cases, automatic dismissal of cases has put survivors of domestic violence and other crimes at greater risk."

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-and-state-o...

This increase is a direct result of passing 2019 "discovery reforms" designed to safeguard the rights of the accused. Read the list of examples on the page I linked and tell me that prosecutors in NYC have "unlimited resources".

It's a constant balancing act.

And BTW:

"Public defender jobs in many places are intensely competitive. Many of us went to law school specifically to become public defenders and have zero interest in working for a big firm. I had a merit scholarship to a top 20 law school and only applied to public defender jobs."

https://xcancel.com/kit_sionn_witch/status/17749841523596168...