State v. Brown

815 S.E.2d 761
CourtSupreme Court of South Carolina
DecidedJune 13, 2018
DocketAppellate Case 2015-002360; Opinion 27814
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 815 S.E.2d 761 (State v. Brown) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of South Carolina primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Brown, 815 S.E.2d 761 (S.C. 2018).

Opinion

JUSTICE FEW :

In this appeal we address whether the digital information stored on a cell phone may be abandoned such that its privacy is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment. The trial court determined the information on the cell phone in this case had been abandoned, and admitted it into evidence. A divided panel of the court of appeals affirmed. State v. Brown , 414 S.C. 14 , 776 S.E.2d 917 (Ct. App. 2015). We affirm the court of appeals.

I. Facts and Procedural History

On December 22, 2011, one of the victims and his girlfriend returned from dinner to his condominium on James Island in the city of Charleston. The victim testified they went straight to the living room because "I had arranged all of her Christmas presents ... on the center coffee table." While she was opening the presents, he heard a phone ringing down the hall toward the bedrooms. Initially, he assumed the phone belonged to his roommate or her boyfriend. After the phone rang a few times, he saw a light and feared it might be someone with a flashlight. He testified, "I got a little nervous so I got up and told my girlfriend to stay in the living room and I walked down the hall and [saw] the ringing phone ... on my bedroom floor." When he turned on his bedroom light, he realized his home had been burglarized. His "window had been broken out" and there was "glass everywhere." The burglar stole his television, his laptop computer, two of his roommate's laptops, and some of her jewelry.

The victim called the police. The first officer on the scene took the cell phone to the police station and secured it in a locker in the evidence room. Six days later, Detective Jordan Lester retrieved the cell phone and was able to observe "a background picture of a black male with dreadlocks." Considering the phone to be "abandoned property," he guessed the code to unlock the screen-1-2-3-4-and opened the phone without a warrant. Detective Lester looked through the "contacts" stored on the phone and found a *763 person listed as "Grandma." He entered "Grandma's" phone number into a database called Accurint and identified a list of her relatives, which included a man matching the age of the person pictured on the background screen of the cell phone-Lamar Brown. Detective Lester then entered Brown's name into the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles database and looked at Brown's driver's license photograph. After comparing the photographs, Detective Lester determined Brown was the man pictured on the screen of the cell phone.

Detective Lester sent other officers to Brown's home to question him. The officers showed Brown the cell phone and informed him it was found at the scene of a burglary. Brown admitted the phone belonged to him, but claimed he lost it on December 23rd-one day after the burglary occurred. Brown also admitted that no one else could have had his cell phone on December 22nd. After questioning Brown, the police charged him with burglary in the first degree.

At trial, Brown's counsel moved to suppress all evidence obtained from the cell phone on the ground Detective Lester conducted an unreasonable search of the phone in violation of Brown's Fourth Amendment rights. The trial court found Brown had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the information stored on the phone because he abandoned it. The jury convicted Brown of first-degree burglary, and the trial court sentenced him to eighteen years in prison. We granted Brown's petition for a writ of certiorari to review the court of appeals' opinion affirming his conviction.

II. Analysis

The Fourth Amendment guarantees us the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. U.S. CONST . amend. IV ; see also S.C. CONST . art. I, § 10. "Abandoned property," however, "has no protection from either the search or seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment." State v. Dupree , 319 S.C. 454 , 457, 462 S.E.2d 279 , 281 (1995) (citing California v. Greenwood , 486 U.S. 35 , 40-41, 108 S.Ct. 1625 , 1628-29, 100 L.Ed. 2d 30 , 36-37 (1988) ). Under a standard abandonment analysis, "the question is whether the defendant has, in discarding the property, relinquished his reasonable expectation of privacy." Dupree , 319 S.C. at 457 , 462 S.E.2d at 281 (quoting City of St. Paul v. Vaughn , 306 Minn. 337 , 237 N.W.2d 365 , 371 (1975) ). As the Fourth Circuit has described it, "When a person voluntarily abandons his privacy interest in property, his subjective expectation of privacy becomes unreasonable...." United States v. Stevenson , 396 F.3d 538 , 546 (4th Cir. 2005) ; see also id. (" '[T]he proper test for abandonment is ... whether the complaining party retains a reasonable expectation of privacy in the [property] alleged to be abandoned.' " (quoting United States v. Haynie , 637 F.2d 227 , 237 (4th Cir. 1980) ) ). In any Fourth Amendment challenge, "defendants must show that they have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the place searched." State v. Missouri , 361 S.C. 107 , 112, 603 S.E.2d 594

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Bluebook (online)
815 S.E.2d 761, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-brown-sc-2018.