A divided Michigan Supreme Court ruled Thursday that law enforcement authorities cannot use a warrant to search a criminal suspect’s cell phone without specifying what it is they’re looking for. The decision sets a higher bar for law enforcement to seek search warrants for cell phones.
The defendant, Michael Carson, was challenging convictions for breaking into a neighbor’s safe, larceny, receiving or concealing stolen property, and conspiracy. Part of the case against Carson was text messages obtained as a result of a search warrant on his cell phone.
On appeal, Carson argued the warrant to search his cell phone was too broad, violating his Fourth Amendment rights, and that his attorney should have done a better job of working to suppress that evidence.
A slim court majority ruled with Carson that the warrant violated his rights against unreasonable search and seizure.
“In our modern age, when cell phones carry a virtually unlimited amount of private information, such wide-ranging exploratory rummaging is constitutionally intolerable and clearly violates the Fourth Amendment,” wrote Chief Justice Megayn Cavanagh in the majority opinion. She was joined by Justices Elizabeth Welch and Kimberly Thomas.
“The authorization to search every nook and cranny of the cell-phone data for ‘any and all records or documents’ and ‘any and all data’ related to safebreaking and larceny provides no meaningful constraint in this case,” said the opinion.
Justice Kyra Bolden joined the majority with a concurring opinion.
Defense attorney Micheal Nichols, who was not part of the case, said the decision is useful because it helps set some guardrails protecting personal information on devices during criminal investigations.
“It gives some guidance, but not much,” he told Michigan Public Radio. “It definitely tells law enforcement you can’t just say I want to search somebody’s cell phone because I’m investigating this crime or that crime. You have to try to be specific, as specific as you can.”
Bonsitu Kitaba, the acting legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan said there is a dearth of case law in Michigan on cell phone searches, so the decision is a significant step. She said the decision recognizes people keep a vast amount of private personal content on their phones.
“The danger of leaving a very broad warrant out there for law enforcement to execute can have devastating harm on people,” she said.
Timothy Baughman filed a brief for the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan. He said a problem with the decision is it does not offer much guidance on a standard for warrants. Baughman says warrants for phone searches are tricky because photos, text messages and other digital evidence can be hidden in all kinds of places.
“Each case is going to turn on its own set of facts and all you can really say is, do better than in this case in trying to be specific as to what it is you’re searching for,” he said.
The majority opinion acknowledged it was not setting a clear standard to follow.
“If this warrant was insufficiently particular, the question that naturally arises is what would satisfy the particularity requirement. Like the Court of Appeals majority in this case, we cannot and do not create a per se rule of specificity that applies to all cell-phone searches.”
But, even though Carson won on the constitutional issue, the court declined to hold he was not adequately represented in court. His appeal essentially rested on the court ruling in his favor on that question. His earliest release date is in 2030.
Justice Brian Zahra said the court should never have tackled the constitutional issue.
In his dissent, Zahra wrote the majority opinion “addresses a hypothetical question of constitutional dimension that has no plausible bearing on the resolution of this case. And not only does the lead opinion exceed its authority in answering that question, it answers the question incorrectly.”
The case now goes back to the Michigan Court of Appeals.
