Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules::Phone-unlocking case law is “total mess,” may be ripe for Supreme Court review.
Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules::Phone-unlocking case law is “total mess,” may be ripe for Supreme Court review.
While it’s tough to have any sympathy for an offender like this, even the worst monsters are entitled to due process and their rights as human beings. Most of the article is about disobeying the court, so that really shouldn’t be news.
It’s the twisted logic that got them there that’s really suspect. If I can paraphrase, “we don’t have enough evidence to incriminate you so you must provide that evidence. The ruling stand because the police already know you’re guilty so incriminating yourself is not self-incrimination”. Yeah, I took some liberties with it, but not as much as the court
At least the ruling limiting jail time makes sense, you can’t imprison someone for contempt longer than the court proceedings, or impanelment, or 18 months, whichever comes first. I didn’t see any implications in the article, but hopefully it either applies generally to contempt, or any contempt charge has a similar limitation. You can’t just imprison someone indefinitely for refusing to speak
Totalitarians try to use cases like this to take your rights away. Never forget how this impacts the innocent. If they can force this man to unlock his phone, they can force any innocent person to do the same. If the police think you’ve committed a crime, accessing your phone will never make them think you’re innocent. The absolute best case scenario is that they don’t find anything useful to their case. The worst case scenario is that they find your social media account where you called arson based last year, and they will use that against you.