By: Tom Ramstack, Apr 9, 2019.
DENVER • Aurora police didn’t violate a murder suspect’s constitutional rights by searching the contents of his cellphone, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The ruling reaches beyond the murder case of Shaun R. Davis into the challenges courts face in handling new technologies.
Davis gave police his pass code so they could call his girlfriend after he was arrested and get her to retrieve his car. Once they had the code, police got a search warrant to forage through the cellphone. They used the code to unlock the phone’s contents for evidence.
Davis argued that the search violated his Fourth Amendment privacy rights. He said the search went too far beyond his permission.
The Colorado Supreme Court disagreed.
“Once an individual discloses the digits of his passcode to law enforcement, we conclude that it is unreasonable to expect those digits to be private from the very party to whom he disclosed them, regardless of any limitations he might be said to have implicitly placed upon the disclosure,” the court wrote in its ruling. “Because Davis had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the digits of his passcode after providing them to [the officer], law enforcement’s use of that passcode was not a search protected by the Fourth Amendment.”
Continue reading at The Gazette HERE.
