State v. Andreas W. Rauch Sharak, 2024AP469-CR, 1/16/25, District 4; case activity (including briefs) Rauch Sharak’s appeal concerns whether Fourth Amendment safeguards are implicated when an electronic service provider (ESP) scans for and reviews digital files in an individual’s account that are flagged as child pornography; and when law enforcement subsequently opens and views any flagged… Read more
4. Cell phones
State v. Michael Joseph Gasper, 2023AP2319, 10/30/24, District 2 (recommended for publication); case activity (including briefs) The circuit court held that an officer’s warrantless inspection of a cyber tip digital video file provided to the officer and identified as child pornography by a private internet service provider constituted an unreasonable search in violation of the… Read more
Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy has posted an essay on a recent federal district court decision regarding the legality of so-called “geofence” warrants, which involve law enforcement getting access to Google’s cell phone location data and using the data to advance a criminal investigation. Google apparently imposes its own sort of “warrant” requirement, and the basic… Read more
State v. Lamondo D. Turrubiates, 2020AP233, 11/23/21, District 3 (one-judge decision; ineligible for publication); case activity (including briefs) Police arrested Turrubiates and the state charged him with several counts having to do with an alleged assault on his girlfriend. During the arrest police took his phone. The state came to believe the phone might contain… Read more
State v. George Steven Burch, 2021 WI 68, on certification from the court of appeals, affirming the judgment of conviction; case activity (including briefs) We said in our post on the court of appeals’ certification that this case presented novel and important issues about searches of cell phones and their data. So we anticipated a decision addressing… Read more
State v. George Steven Burch, 2019AP404-CR, certification granted 11/18/20; case activity (including briefs) Issues presented (from the certification): Did police violate Burch’s Fourth Amendment rights by: exceeding the scope of Burch’s consent to search his cell phone by downloading the phone’s entire contents, rather than only the text messages; unlawfully retaining the entire cell phone… Read more
State v. George Steven Burch, 2019AP404-CR, District 3 (10/20/20), review granted 11/18/20, circuit court judgment affirmed, 2021 WI 68; case activity (including briefs) Burch … contends the [Green Bay Police Department] and the [Brown County Sheriff’s Office] violated his Fourth Amendment rights in three ways: (1) the GBPD exceeded the scope of his consent to… Read more
Last June in Carpenter v. United States, SCOTUS held that phone users have a 4th Amendment right to historical cell site location records. Prof. Orin Kerr has a new paper out about how to implement Carpenter. Click here. But why stop reading there? You can also read Prof. Alan Rozenshtein’s new paper on 4th Amendment… Read more
