Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting searches of cell phones without a warrant, investigators acted correctly when they did just that to retrieve damning evidence against an Orange County pimp, according to an appellate court ruling obtained Wednesday.
A three-justice panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed a lower court judge’s ruling allowing evidence retrieved from the cell phone of Marsalis Joseph Smith, who pleaded guilty to human trafficking and criminal threats and was sentenced to five years in prison July 25 last year.
The justices ruled that Orange County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Menninger made the right call because she was relying on a state Supreme Court ruling that was in place at the time of the search and was struck down weeks later by the nation’s high court.
Attorney Laura R. Sheppard argued the federal ruling should have been the precedent applied because the state ruling was “both not good law and inapposite,” according to the appellate ruling.
The justices sided with the Attorney General, who argued the state ruling was “good law and officers acted in good faith…”
Sheppard told City News Service that Friday’s ruling has not yet been “published,” meaning it is not considered precedent yet.
“I plan to file (a) petition for review because the issue is already pending before the state Supreme Court,” Sheppard said.
Sheppard said she disagrees with the ruling because her client’s phone was password-protected and investigators had to bypass it to extract the evidence.
“My argument was that it should have been suppressed, because (the state ruling) applied to a much narrower category of cell phone search that did not include the password-violating digital data extraction that was done to my client’s phone,” Sheppard said.
The state Supreme Court will be considering a similar appeal in another case, she said.
Any ruling from the state’s high court will just apply to cases before the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, however, because no cell phone can be searched without a warrant now.
The evidence on Smith’s phone involved photos of a 17-year-old girl who said Smith was her pimp. She told officers that Smith watched while his friends assaulted her and the photos of her taken with the cell phone were used for his illicit website, according to the appellate ruling.
Smith was the alleged pimp of 17-year-old Aubreyanna Sade Parks, who was killed in February 2014. Trial is pending for her alleged killer, Larry Soo Shin.
— City News Service