Montana’s Supreme Court rules officer unlawfully searched cell phone in child pornagraphy case

The Montana Supreme Court handed down a ruling Tuesday that puts stricter confines on what information law enforcement can access when carrying out searches on digital devices, marking a big win for digital privacy advocates.

At the center of the case is Bradley Mefford, of Butte, who was arrested in 2016 for child pornography. Mefford, who was violating his parole curfew at the time gave his parole officer, Jake Miller, permission to read a Facebook messenger conversation between him and his daughter to prove he was violating his curfew to talk to her.

But instead of just reading the conversation, the officer continued to search through other areas of his phone — raising concerns about what is fair play for law enforcement when searching digital landscapes, which can contain a vast amount of personal information from bank statements to photographs.

The court vacated the charges against Mefford ruling the search was unlawful because it was “not executed pursuant to a valid warrant exception and therefore was not reasonable within the meaning of the Montana and United States Constitutions.”

The opinion was authored by Justice Beth Baker who compared the search of Mefford’s phone to a search of a physical space.

“It was no more reasonable for Miller to believe that he had permission to search Mefford’s photos to corroborate the identity of his daughter than it would have been for him to search through a photo album in Mefford’s bedroom or a rolodex on Mefford’s office desk for information regarding Mefford’s daughter,” Baker wrote.

The ACLU of Montana, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing on Mefford’s behalf applauded the ruling in a press release.

“Today, the Montana Supreme Court made clear that we have a fundamental right to cell phone privacy,” Alex Rate, legal director at ACLU of Montana, said in the release. “And we’re heartened to see the Court agree that police should not be able to leverage someone’s consent to search specific information on their cell phone for a limited purpose into a search of anything or everything on the device for any purpose at all.”

In its filing, the ACLU of Montana argued that courts must interpret state and federal Constitutions to protect against police indiscriminately rummaging through private and sensitive information on electronic devices.

“We live in a reality in which each of us carries our entire life in the palm of our hand,” said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “This decision is an important step towards ensuring that there are real constitutional limits on searches of our digital information.”