Officers Lawfully Seized Cell Phone Under Plain View Exception

State v. Holland, Minn.S.Ct., 6/24/2015.  Mr. Holland called the police from his apartment to report that a woman - who turned out to be his dead girlfriend, Margorie Holland - was unconscious, not breathing, and cold.  Police came over and found Ms. Holland lying on her back at the bottom of a set of stairs inside the apartment. Mr. Holland told one of the first officers to arrive that he had gone out to get Ms. Holland some food from Taco Bell but that she had texted him to go to McDonald's instead.  When he returned, Mr. Holland found Ms. Holland at the bottom of the stairs.The officer asked Mr. Holland about the text messages, she said so that she could determine just how long Ms. Holland had been unresponsive. Mr. Holland's hands shook so bad, however, that he gave the officer the phone.  The officer looked at the messages and actually concluded that the text message exchanges between the Hollands were consistent with Mr. Holland's description of his activities that morning.   The officer gave the phone to a detective who later obtained a search warrant to examine the full content of the phone. Eventually the state charged Mr. Holland with first degree murder and a jury convicted him of those charges.

Mr. Holland moved to suppress evidence of the contents of the phone, arguing that police had seized the phone without a warrant in violation of both federal and state constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.  The state agreed on appeal that the officers had seized the phone but sought to justify that seizure under the plain view exception to the warrant requirement.

Chief Justice Gildea, for the full court, agrees that plain view permitted the seizure of the phone.  She also agreed with Mr. Holland that police do need probable cause to believe that the item seized - in this case the cell phone - is of an incriminating nature, but in the court's view the cops had it.  The Chief Justice said that when the officers looked at the phone - which arguably amounted to a consent from Mr. Holland for the cops to seize it, an argument that the made but the court ducked - the text messages at issue were openly displayed on the screen.  The detective on scene, however, became suspicious of Mr. Holland's explanation of events because of the position of the body and its discoloration; the detective suspected that Ms. Holland had been dead longer than Mr. Holland's explanation suggested. The detective decided to hang onto the phone in order to request a search warrant of its contents, sort of like "freezing" a scene for the same purpose.  The Chief Justice said that although the text messages alone were not evidence of criminal activity when put in context with the detective's suspicions they became such evidence.

Mr. Holland challenged several other search warrants, some of which he said were based on information obtained from what he said was the unlawful seizure of the cell phone.  The court made short shrift of these challenges once it concluded that the officers had properly seized the phone.  Finally, Mr. Holland challenged search warrants of bank accounts and financial records.  The court concluded that the warrants were supported by probable cause.