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That’s because law enforcement is encourage to give least amount of effort to find any kind of damning evidence that a DA can use. The detective doesn’t care ab

That’s because law enforcement is encourage to give least amount of effort to find any kind of damning evidence that a DA can use. The detective doesn’t care about justice but instead closing the case. If I have access to your entire phone, I can use anything I find against you as probable cause whether it’s related to the crime or not.

pcaharrier 1y ago
> If I have access to your entire phone, I can use anything I find against you as probable cause whether it’s related to the crime or not. Well, that gets into the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, but we're not doing a full criminal procedure law school course today . . . Ironically, I heard more than one detective say that when they "dumped" a phone like that, they rarely found much useful evidence. There's just too much information on any given cell phone to be able to go through it all. So, in the end, their fishing expeditions end up being a waste of time and resources.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  If they have a warrant to the phone, what is poisoned fruit? It only becomes tainted evidence if they eg) stole the phone and rifled through it.
  - pcaharrier 1y ago
    If they have a warrant that adheres to the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment, then anything they might find that it outside the scope of the warrant would be illegally seized. For instance, if the search warrant were to say "search the contacts on the phone" and they go looking for pictures.
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      That's why they get a warrant for the full contents of the phone though?
      - pcaharrier 1y ago
        A warrant for the full contents of the phone violates the particularity requirement.
        nemomarx 1y ago
        Have you heard about that being enforced very often?
        pcaharrier 1y ago
        I mean, there are a few noted here if you want a starting place for your research: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/particularity-requirement https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/p...
        nemomarx 1y ago
        That does seem pretty helpful, I'll try and run down the list later
  - snuxoll 1y ago
    Warrants are pre-trial activities to collect evidence, defendants (or, more likely, their attorneys) are still able to challenge the admissibility of evidence should a case go to trial. If it turns out a search warrant was requested in bad faith, or the trial judge (which won't necessarily be the same one that signed the warrant, and then there's appeals courts) finds the warrant was defective (overly broad, lack of probable cause, etc.) and should not have been issued in the first place then any evidence stemming from it could be thrown out. "Fruit of the poisonous tree" simply means the entire chain, the initial evidence that was improperly acquired and anything that was discovered based upon it, gets thrown out. If a warrant was issued to dump the full contents of your phone, and they used location metadata from your photo library to start determining other locations to search and got warrants for those, then that entire chain of evidence gets thrown out if the court finds the initial warrant for your phone was invalid.
    - singleshot_ 1y ago
      > then that entire chain of evidence gets thrown out exceptions: unless it would have gotten found anyway, regardless (inevitable discovery); or the cops, against whom the doctrine of poisonous tree is held in order to keep them honest, just made an honest mistake.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > If they have a warrant to the phone, what is poisoned fruit? Litigation over the process, claims, and ultimately validity of the warrant happens after it is executed, where the product is used in a criminal case (one of the commonly argued problems with the FISA warrant process is that, because the products are not used in criminal cases, this never occurs, and because it is known that it will never occur, the constraints that the possibility of challenge places on both the conduct of executive agents seeking warrants and judges granting them also is missing.)
- Yeul 1y ago
  If detectives had limitless time and resources they could go through every damn doorbell and CCTV camera but they ain't going to do that unless the case involves dead kids.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    Dead kids with wealthy or famous parents, anyways.
- schrectacular 1y ago
  To me this is the real sinister issue with the current round of AI that I hear no one talking about. It will solve this problem for the powers-that-be.
  - daveidol 1y ago
    That part sounds like a good thing? Assuming the warrant was legitimate- that’s the part that feels problematic.
potato3732842 1y ago
You believe way too much in the system. They DGAF about the DV. Maybe the charge will stick, maybe it won't. Sure they like it more than a traffic ticket but it's not much more valuable to them than a DUI. People get smacked upside the head every day and it's no big deal in their world. They want to use the DV as the pretext for a fishing expedition, In their minds maybe they can nail the guy on drug dealing or whatever other more interesting and valuable crime they can find
- pcaharrier 1y ago
  >You believe way too much in the system. Who me? I assure you I don't. In the particular case I described above there were some factors about who the person was that make me pretty confident the police were wanting to sniff around for something juicier (though because of his situation, even the accusation of domestic violence was going to be enough to ruin certain things for him, even if nothing ever came of it). That's SOP for many things where, for example, certain departments train officers to use traffic stops as pretexts to "elevate" the encounter to a felony arrest. They don't care that the guy failed to come to a complete stop at that stop sign, but they like their chances of getting consent to search his vehicle and finding (or, in the egregious cases, planting) something else. Edit: I see that you weren't replying directly to me. Sorry about that.
- righthand 1y ago
  I don’t disagree and I don’t really believe in the system anymore after the Daniel Penny trial.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
I would say the goal is probably securing a conviction for the crime the detective believes took place: Closing the case is not inherently enough, and while there are some, I doubt most investigators sleep well at night that they convicted someone they think is innocent. Our standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and ideally in a working justice system, judges should be throwing out any evidence which is prejudicial. So your detective has a general motive to find as much evidence as possible, overwhelming evidence, ideally, such that after all legal challenges have been passed through there is still enough evidence left on the table to concretely prove a case. Obviously there's a lot of places our justice system can and does break down, but it is generally designed on the concept everyone involved in prosecution and defense should work to create the best possible case for their understanding.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  I've never met an DA investigator or a DA that gave a single hoot if someone was factually innocent (this is actually rare). Even this "going through the phone" thing might be ruled illegal, but that only matters if the case goes as far as filing a motion to suppress. And if you are represented by a public defender then I would say your chances are slim at having that happen. What normally happens in cases like this is that each side barter with what they have (DA: "we went through his phone and found photos of him with guns, drugs and money" vs. PD: "the search was illegal, if you pursue this I'll file for suppression") to get the longest sentence they can (DA) vs. the shortest sentence (PD) on a plea deal. I think the statistic is maybe 1% of criminal cases go to trial?
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    Yeah, the US (mis)uses the plea deal to an appalling extent. It's amazingly fucked. Most other countries don't have the concept, or if they do, its use is generally fairly minimal, and heavily regulated - oftentimes, it might be "plead guilty to this one murder" in the case of a multiple homicide, to avoid having three separate costly trials.
    - AngryData 1y ago
lenerdenator 1y ago
Idk about other jurisdictions but locally that doesn't seem to be something I see a lot of in probable cause filings. Typically there's a reason the police were called to a given location and a reason they're honing in on the person they want to arrest, and they don't really need to dig around in someone's data to find a reason to justify the request for a warrant. IANAL, just some guy who gets bored and reads CaseNet. Yes, I am aware that this is not a sign of a healthy mind.
LadyCailin 1y ago
This is why you don’t talk to the police, ESPECIALLY if you’re innocent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Never to help you. If you’re guilty, and you get found guilty because you accidentally confessed, who cares, you were guilty. If you were innocent, and you accidentally confessed, that is in fact a miscarriage of justice, but the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  >the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different. Seems overly cynical. How about public defenders, Miranda rights, etc.? The US court system is set up to be adversarial. The belief is that you get the best overall outcome by having one set of people who try to convict, and another set of people who try to acquit. One can also make the system look bad from the other direction by arguing that public defenders are terrible, because their job is to help criminals walk free. https://xcancel.com/katanaspeaks/status/1954636840272884111 https://xcancel.com/katanaspeaks/status/1954636840272884111 You're welcome to argue against the overall concept of an adversarial court system. But the system has to be taken in total, rather than selectively focusing on one side.
  - mapt 1y ago
    In the US, public defenders may try 1000 cases a year, may not meet you until five minutes before the initial plea, may have essentially zero investigative capability. Court cases may take years to arise, bail may be effectively denied by virtue of economics, and the plea bargain offered is often <5% of the sentence sought, while being the ultimate way of settling nearly every case. Arguing for the merits of an adversarial system is one thing. But many parts of due process are effectively completely dead for the vast majority of defendants, and prosecutorial discretion rules the justice system almost completely for those of us who aren't millionaires. "Adversarial" might work for OJ Simpson, but it hasn't worked for most of us for a long time, and the US prison system holds the most prisoners per capita in the world - it isn't close†. Defenders of the shortcuts we have created proudly justify it as saving the taxpayer money; of making workable a situation where they feel they are underfunded by an order of magnitude, but the reality is that it is justice amputated of essential components. If you want to save money, maybe consider making fewer things illegal, and imprisoning people for a shorter amount of time, but go back to actually holding real, speedy trials that are effectively adversarial in nature. In the meantime, we have a judge/jury/executioner in the DA's office, and they get re-elected electorally largely based on their conviction rate; Like shooting fish in a barrel. †Depending on how you view internment camps for specific minorities

pcaharrier 1y ago

> If I have access to your entire phone, I can use anything I find against you as probable cause whether it’s related to the crime or not. Well, that gets into the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, but we're not doing a full criminal procedure law school course today . . . Ironically, I heard more than one detective say that when they "dumped" a phone like that, they rarely found much useful evidence. There's just too much information on any given cell phone to be able to go through it all. So, in the end, their fishing expeditions end up being a waste of time and resources.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
If they have a warrant to the phone, what is poisoned fruit? It only becomes tainted evidence if they eg) stole the phone and rifled through it.
- pcaharrier 1y ago
  If they have a warrant that adheres to the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment, then anything they might find that it outside the scope of the warrant would be illegally seized. For instance, if the search warrant were to say "search the contacts on the phone" and they go looking for pictures.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    That's why they get a warrant for the full contents of the phone though?
    - pcaharrier 1y ago
      A warrant for the full contents of the phone violates the particularity requirement.
      - nemomarx 1y ago
        Have you heard about that being enforced very often?
        pcaharrier 1y ago
        I mean, there are a few noted here if you want a starting place for your research: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/particularity-requirement https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/p...
        nemomarx 1y ago
        That does seem pretty helpful, I'll try and run down the list later
- snuxoll 1y ago
  Warrants are pre-trial activities to collect evidence, defendants (or, more likely, their attorneys) are still able to challenge the admissibility of evidence should a case go to trial. If it turns out a search warrant was requested in bad faith, or the trial judge (which won't necessarily be the same one that signed the warrant, and then there's appeals courts) finds the warrant was defective (overly broad, lack of probable cause, etc.) and should not have been issued in the first place then any evidence stemming from it could be thrown out. "Fruit of the poisonous tree" simply means the entire chain, the initial evidence that was improperly acquired and anything that was discovered based upon it, gets thrown out. If a warrant was issued to dump the full contents of your phone, and they used location metadata from your photo library to start determining other locations to search and got warrants for those, then that entire chain of evidence gets thrown out if the court finds the initial warrant for your phone was invalid.
  - singleshot_ 1y ago
    > then that entire chain of evidence gets thrown out exceptions: unless it would have gotten found anyway, regardless (inevitable discovery); or the cops, against whom the doctrine of poisonous tree is held in order to keep them honest, just made an honest mistake.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > If they have a warrant to the phone, what is poisoned fruit? Litigation over the process, claims, and ultimately validity of the warrant happens after it is executed, where the product is used in a criminal case (one of the commonly argued problems with the FISA warrant process is that, because the products are not used in criminal cases, this never occurs, and because it is known that it will never occur, the constraints that the possibility of challenge places on both the conduct of executive agents seeking warrants and judges granting them also is missing.)
Yeul 1y ago
If detectives had limitless time and resources they could go through every damn doorbell and CCTV camera but they ain't going to do that unless the case involves dead kids.
- RajT88 1y ago
  Dead kids with wealthy or famous parents, anyways.
schrectacular 1y ago
To me this is the real sinister issue with the current round of AI that I hear no one talking about. It will solve this problem for the powers-that-be.
- daveidol 1y ago
  That part sounds like a good thing? Assuming the warrant was legitimate- that’s the part that feels problematic.

potato3732842 1y ago

You believe way too much in the system. They DGAF about the DV. Maybe the charge will stick, maybe it won't. Sure they like it more than a traffic ticket but it's not much more valuable to them than a DUI. People get smacked upside the head every day and it's no big deal in their world. They want to use the DV as the pretext for a fishing expedition, In their minds maybe they can nail the guy on drug dealing or whatever other more interesting and valuable crime they can find

pcaharrier 1y ago
>You believe way too much in the system. Who me? I assure you I don't. In the particular case I described above there were some factors about who the person was that make me pretty confident the police were wanting to sniff around for something juicier (though because of his situation, even the accusation of domestic violence was going to be enough to ruin certain things for him, even if nothing ever came of it). That's SOP for many things where, for example, certain departments train officers to use traffic stops as pretexts to "elevate" the encounter to a felony arrest. They don't care that the guy failed to come to a complete stop at that stop sign, but they like their chances of getting consent to search his vehicle and finding (or, in the egregious cases, planting) something else. Edit: I see that you weren't replying directly to me. Sorry about that.
righthand 1y ago
I don’t disagree and I don’t really believe in the system anymore after the Daniel Penny trial.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago

I would say the goal is probably securing a conviction for the crime the detective believes took place: Closing the case is not inherently enough, and while there are some, I doubt most investigators sleep well at night that they convicted someone they think is innocent. Our standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and ideally in a working justice system, judges should be throwing out any evidence which is prejudicial. So your detective has a general motive to find as much evidence as possible, overwhelming evidence, ideally, such that after all legal challenges have been passed through there is still enough evidence left on the table to concretely prove a case. Obviously there's a lot of places our justice system can and does break down, but it is generally designed on the concept everyone involved in prosecution and defense should work to create the best possible case for their understanding.

qingcharles 1y ago
I've never met an DA investigator or a DA that gave a single hoot if someone was factually innocent (this is actually rare). Even this "going through the phone" thing might be ruled illegal, but that only matters if the case goes as far as filing a motion to suppress. And if you are represented by a public defender then I would say your chances are slim at having that happen. What normally happens in cases like this is that each side barter with what they have (DA: "we went through his phone and found photos of him with guns, drugs and money" vs. PD: "the search was illegal, if you pursue this I'll file for suppression") to get the longest sentence they can (DA) vs. the shortest sentence (PD) on a plea deal. I think the statistic is maybe 1% of criminal cases go to trial?
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Yeah, the US (mis)uses the plea deal to an appalling extent. It's amazingly fucked. Most other countries don't have the concept, or if they do, its use is generally fairly minimal, and heavily regulated - oftentimes, it might be "plead guilty to this one murder" in the case of a multiple homicide, to avoid having three separate costly trials.
  - AngryData 1y ago

lenerdenator 1y ago

Idk about other jurisdictions but locally that doesn't seem to be something I see a lot of in probable cause filings. Typically there's a reason the police were called to a given location and a reason they're honing in on the person they want to arrest, and they don't really need to dig around in someone's data to find a reason to justify the request for a warrant. IANAL, just some guy who gets bored and reads CaseNet. Yes, I am aware that this is not a sign of a healthy mind.

LadyCailin 1y ago

This is why you don’t talk to the police, ESPECIALLY if you’re innocent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Never to help you. If you’re guilty, and you get found guilty because you accidentally confessed, who cares, you were guilty. If you were innocent, and you accidentally confessed, that is in fact a miscarriage of justice, but the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different.

0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
>the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different. Seems overly cynical. How about public defenders, Miranda rights, etc.? The US court system is set up to be adversarial. The belief is that you get the best overall outcome by having one set of people who try to convict, and another set of people who try to acquit. One can also make the system look bad from the other direction by arguing that public defenders are terrible, because their job is to help criminals walk free. https://xcancel.com/katanaspeaks/status/1954636840272884111 https://xcancel.com/katanaspeaks/status/1954636840272884111 You're welcome to argue against the overall concept of an adversarial court system. But the system has to be taken in total, rather than selectively focusing on one side.
- mapt 1y ago
  In the US, public defenders may try 1000 cases a year, may not meet you until five minutes before the initial plea, may have essentially zero investigative capability. Court cases may take years to arise, bail may be effectively denied by virtue of economics, and the plea bargain offered is often <5% of the sentence sought, while being the ultimate way of settling nearly every case. Arguing for the merits of an adversarial system is one thing. But many parts of due process are effectively completely dead for the vast majority of defendants, and prosecutorial discretion rules the justice system almost completely for those of us who aren't millionaires. "Adversarial" might work for OJ Simpson, but it hasn't worked for most of us for a long time, and the US prison system holds the most prisoners per capita in the world - it isn't close†. Defenders of the shortcuts we have created proudly justify it as saving the taxpayer money; of making workable a situation where they feel they are underfunded by an order of magnitude, but the reality is that it is justice amputated of essential components. If you want to save money, maybe consider making fewer things illegal, and imprisoning people for a shorter amount of time, but go back to actually holding real, speedy trials that are effectively adversarial in nature. In the meantime, we have a judge/jury/executioner in the DA's office, and they get re-elected electorally largely based on their conviction rate; Like shooting fish in a barrel. †Depending on how you view internment camps for specific minorities