More importantly, why did they feel the phone owner was likely to destroy the footage?

Yes, I did.

The phone is the storage device the evidence is stored on. If the guy never gets his phone back that's an obvious problem.

Your jimmies are rustled and you're looking for something to bitch about.

It's always a legitimate fear whenever someone doesn't want to turn it over.

In this guys came I'd say he did. He didn't protest in any way that I read.

Wat

Obv.

And flagrantly unconstitutional. If you really need footage from my phone, go get a warrant. Or maybe try politely asking me to upload the footage to you.

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybe...manual2009.pdf if anyone wants to read

Why would they? He turned it over.

I'm familiar with how this works. You're gonna bitch, but you're getting detained because that evidence is staying secure, one way or another.

If I ask nicely and you refuse, I will detain you for the approximately 3.5 hours it's going to take to get this handled. Or you can just cooperate.

Both are legal avenues.

A lot of people want a warrant (what kind of psychopath doesn't want to turn relevant evidence of a homicide over to investigating authorities I'll never understand, but to each their own I guess) then change their mind when they realize it's not quite "on your merry way then, we'll come find you when we need you" it's much more "ok, you're coming with me, when we can get the evidence dumped you and your phone are free to go" type thing.

B. The Fourth Amendment’s “Reasonable Expectation
of Privacy” in Cases Involving Computers
1. General Principles
A search is constitutional if it does not violate a person’s “reasonable” or
“legitimate” expectation of privacy. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361
(1967) (Harlan, J., concurring). This inquiry embraces two discrete questions:
first, whether the individual’s conduct reflects “an actual (subjective) expectation
of privacy,” and second, whether the individual’s subjective expectation of
privacy is “one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” Id. at 361.
In most cases, the difficulty of contesting a defendant’s subjective expectation
of privacy focuses the analysis on the objective aspect of the Katz test, i.e.,
whether the individual’s expectation of privacy was reasonable.

Would you guys think videotaping a cop-villain public showdown is a reasonable expectation of privacy?

Paul, see you edited, but here's the most relevant case law


US v McConney

Where exigent circumstances are defined as:

BTW, "reasonable expectation of privacy" is the wrong avenue. Of course people have a "reasonable expectation" that the police don't search through their phones, but the exigency of the circumstance (easily destroyed evidence being possessed by an unidentified, I uncooperative witness, holding vital photographic evidence relevant to an active homicide investigation) causes the states interest in justice to outweigh the typically unreasonable encroachment into the privacy of the citizen.

The kind of psychopath who enjoys due process and understands that if I voluntarily hand over the phone, you've got a green light to search everything on it, whereas with a warrant, you only get to look at the material relevant to the crime.

If it's a homicide investigation, I'm going to cheerfully wait for a few hours to make sure there's a judge involved and a paper trail.

J,

Do you think the argument that was used ~1 year ago for why cell phones were bad (people are interfering with arrests!) was any more or less bull**** than the line of reasoning that you are using now?

I am no lawyer here lol... and I wouldn't want people getting their phones jack by jack booted thugs all the time. But it seems like if you are filming evidence of crimes that your argument of reasonable expectation of privacy goes down because you are doing so in a public place.

It's not a question of expectation of privacy, it's a simple matter of my phone being my property that shouldn't be sized without due process.

This is wholly false. I built my very first child pornography case where my suspect was the suspect in a terroristic threats case.

We got a search warrant to review his phone for evidence of terroristic threats, I found a pornographic image I believed to be a minor, printed it, typed up a second warrant to search for kiddy porn, got it signed, it's been appealed and upheld twice as a perfect usage of plain sight doctrine.


The better idea is not to leave evidence of crime on your phone, particularly if you're going to intentionally turn your phone into exhibit A of a homicide investigation.