Court Reverses Conviction After Cops Lied To Suspect About Having A Warrant To Search His Phone

Legal Issues

from the good-luck-with-weak-ass-case,-coppers dept

It’s well-known that cops can lie to suspects to obtain confessions or further information from suspects. But not always. This Delaware case, brought to us by FourthAmendment.com, demonstrates that while lying in interrogation rooms is usually cool and fine, it isn’t when it moves someone to consent to a search they wouldn’t have agreed to under other circumstances.

Shaheed Matthews was convicted of murder in 2019. The case against Matthews was extremely flimsy, but prosecutors shored it up with evidence taken from his cell phone. Here’s how the court describes the rest of the evidence in its decision [PDF] that overturns the murder conviction on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel:

No direct physical evidence linked Matthews to Terry’s shooting. Instead, the State relied on circumstantial evidence—including evidence from Matthews’s cellphone, witness testimony, video camera footage of varying quality, and gunshot residue of an unknown vintage found on Matthews’s jacket.

This opening summary underplays just how lousy this so-called “evidence” was. The testimony from the officers was generally terrible, with them even admitting that the bullet casings found at the scene couldn’t be traced to any particular weapon, not even the murder weapon the cops never found.

The video “evidence” wasn’t any better.

The video surveillance evidence—devoid of sound and mostly in black and white—is of varying, and often poor, quality. In the portions of the videos in which people are visible, the low quality of the images and the distance from which the video was recorded preclude any conclusive identification of the individuals.

No problem, said the prosecutor. We also have these recordings!

The State also played three better quality clips of the surveillance video taken from 241 Parma Avenue. Two videos, about eight seconds long, show two individuals running down Parma Avenue at 10:46 p.m. One individual appears to have at least one arm outstretched and seems to be running behind another individual wearing a dark jacket and a hood on their head. The third video shows a car driving down Parma Avenue at 10:47 p.m. Detective Reid acknowledged that he could not clearly discern the vehicle’s make and model, nor could he see the vehicle’s license plate number or its occupants.

Multiple “witnesses” were called to the stand, but none of them could positively ID anyone they saw after they heard gunshots.

Then there was the gunshot residue “evidence,” which wasn’t any better than anything else supplied to the court.

A forensic scientist from a materials characterization lab testified that “there was a population of gunshot residue present” on Matthews’s jacket. She acknowledged that she could not tell how long the gunshot residue had been present on his coat, noting that she could not “say how [gunshot residue] got there, [or] when it got there. Just that it’s there.” She conceded that “it was possible” that “it could have gotten there a month ago, a year ago” or even “multiple years ago” and that gunshot residue “can sometimes get trapped within the weave of the fabric” and can “actually stay . . . on fabric[] for a long period of time.

Yeah. Not great. That’s why the prosecution relied so heavily on the cell phone evidence. Not that there was much evidence there either. The prosecution made a big deal of this innocuous text message exchange between Matthews and his girlfriend the morning after the (apparently still-unsolved) shooting:

Johnson: “I love you so much, and I cannot lose you.”
Matthews: “You won’t babe. Come to me as soon as you get off[.]”
Johnson: “Changes have to be made now, okay[.]”
Matthews: “I agree.”

The prosecution also talked a lot about calls that were completed, calls that were missed, calls that were never made to certain people (suggesting the lack of phone calls to the murder victim showed Matthews had no reason to call him because he knew he was dead), and some other stuff gleaned from his phone during the forensic search.

Like this:

[T]he State introduced text messages that Matthews exchanged with an unknown person on December 20, 2017, in which Matthews inquired about the cost of a “Taurus Millennium,” and, after the individual replied “450[,]” Matthews responded with, “[t]hat’s too much.”

And this:

In addition, the State presented evidence of Matthews’s search history on December 25 and 26, 2017, showing that he “searched through Google” the terms “Ruger 45” and “Ruger P97.” On cross-examination, Detective Reid acknowledged that Matthews’s internet search was “just a general search” and that “[t]here’s no indication a purchase was made, or any attempt to purchase.”

Somehow, the Lionel Hutzs in charge of this case decided the phone stuff was the smoking gun (you know, in lieu of an actual smoking gun).

In total, the State mentioned the cellphone evidence at least eighteen times in its closing argument.

The prosecution convinced the jury to convict. And that conviction withstood multiple challenges at multiple levels before this one landed in front of the state’s Supreme Court. It’s not a motion to suppress the evidence. That came and went with the jury trial. Matthews argues his counsel was ineffective for failing to move to suppress the phone evidence during his trial.

The Supreme Court agrees. The phone evidence should have been suppressed because the investigators obtained it illegally. That’s not all that unusual. Constitution violations by crime fighters are pretty common.

It’s how the investigators did it that’s unusual. They asked Matthews about his cell phone. At first, he denied having one. After a bit more questioning he admitted he owned one and where it could be found. Then one of the investigators (as captured on another detective’s body cam) had this exchange with Matthews:

[Unknown Detective]: Well, here’s the thing; we have a search warrant for it.
[Matthews]: Okay.
[Unknown Detective]: Okay? So, uh, we’re going to take it anyway.
Matthews: Yeah, you can [unintelligible][.]

Yeah, that wasn’t true. At all.

At trial, Detective Eugene Reid, one of the lead detectives on the case, confirmed that the police seized Matthews’s cellphone: “we had a search warrant to collect his [cellphone], and we collected that from him at his residence.” In fact, the police did not secure a search warrant until the following day.

After taking some time to chastise the trial court for allowing the prosecution to propel this pile of so-called evidence past it and into the hands of a jury, the Supreme Court says the “consent” to a search wasn’t actually consensual because the detective lied about the existence of a search warrant.

At most, Matthews provided consent to search his cellphone after law enforcement told him they had a warrant. This is insufficient. Under Bumper, there can be no consent where the official conducting the search has first asserted that they have a warrant.

And that precedent was clear enough his counsel should have, at the very least, filed a motion to suppress the evidence.

Ambiguity as to whether a party provided valid consent is resolved against a finding of consent. Here, we find that Matthews did not provide valid consent to the detectives to search his cellphone. Thus, trial counsel’s failure to move to suppress the evidence obtained from Matthews’s cellphone was deficient under Strickland.

If this evidence had been suppressed, the government’s closing arguments would have had at least 18 fewer assertions about Matthews’ alleged guilt. Without those, it’s unlikely a jury would have arrived at the conclusion it did. The conviction is reversed. The government will have to try to prove its case again, only without the phone stuff that didn’t really add all that much to its tiny pile of circumstantial evidence.

Given this bruising opinion from the state’s top court, one would expect the government to nolle pros this case. Then again, prosecutors playing with house money have nothing to lose by being vindictive. Matthews has been reverted back to “innocent until proven guilty” but he’s far from free to go.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, cell phone, delaware, evidence, police misconduct, privacy, warrant