• roguetrick
    link
    fedilink
    11 year ago

    I am conflicted on how I feel about that. Obviously information dragonets are bad because they’re specifically designed to produce false positives. In this case, however, they produced a definite positive that wouldn’t have been achieved otherwise.

    Edit:

    The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule provides that “evidence
    obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment should not be suppressed in
    circumstances where the evidence was obtained by officers acting in objectively
    reasonable reliance on a warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate, even
    if that warrant was later determined to be invalid.” Gutierrez, 222 P.3d at 941; see
    also Leftwich, 869 P.2d at 1272 (holding that Colorado’s good-faith exception,
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    codified in section 16-3-308, C.R.S. (2023), is “substantially similar” to the Supreme
    Court’s rule). The exception exists because there is little chance suppression will
    deter police misconduct in cases where the police didn’t know their conduct was
    illegal in the first place. Leon, 468 U.S. at 918–19. In such cases, “the social costs of
    suppression would outweigh any possible deterrent effect.

    But the good-faith analysis in Gutierrez is distinguishable. True, we held
    there that the good-faith exception did not apply, but we had already recognized
    that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their financial records
    when Gutierrez was decided. Id. at 933 (citing numerous cases and statutes
    establishing that an individual’s financial records are protected under Colorado
    law). So, the police were on notice that a nexus was required between a crime and
    Gutierrez’s individual tax records. See id.

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    ¶70 By contrast, until today, no court had established that individuals have a
    constitutionally protected privacy interest in their Google search history. Cf.
    Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 294 A.3d 509, 522 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2023) (holding that, under
    the third-party doctrine, the defendant did not have a reasonable expectation of
    privacy in his search history). In the absence of precedent explicitly establishing
    that an individual’s Google search history is constitutionally protected, DPD had
    no reason to know that it might have needed to demonstrate a connection between
    the alleged crime and Seymour’s individual Google account.

    In essence, the court is saying that this is the one and only time this will be allowed in Colorado.

    https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA12.pdf