By Olivia Covington, March 8, 2019.
Even though law enforcement conducted a warrantless Fourth Amendment search when they accessed of a man’s cellphone location data, the admission of the data does not warrant a new trial because any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Friday, upholding a man’s four convictions in a case heard on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a unanimous opinion authored by Chief Justice Loretta Rush, the state’s high court upheld Marcus Zanders’ convictions of two counts of robbery with a deadly weapon and two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm by a serious violent felon in Marcus Zanders v. State of Indiana, 15S01-1611-CR-571.
The justices had previously upheld Zanders’ liquor-store-robbery-related convictions in May 2017, when they ruled police could obtain cellphone location data without a warrant. But after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. —-, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018), the case was remanded to the Indiana high court for reconsideration. Carpenter held that the third-party doctrine did not apply to seven days or more of historical cell-site location information, or CSLI, so law enforcement must get a search warrant to obtain those records.
The Indiana Court of Appeals reached a similar holding in overturning Zanders’ convictions in May 2016. Zanders’ CSLI had been admitted over his objection at his trial, but a divided COA determined law enforcement should have obtained a warrant before obtaining the location data…
Continue reading at TheIndianaLawyer.com HERE.
