Personally I don't have any problem with geofenced warrants. I actually think they are a pretty great idea. So I would more say that he spent $2000 pointlessly. What would likely have happened if he hadn't fought it is the prosecutors would have gotten the data, seen who he was, and been like, nah, not our guy. They don't just go and arrest every single person who has been in a geofenced region when they get these warrants. They use it to look for who might be worth additional investigation.
You need to spend some time googling “wrongful convictions” there’s literally thousands of these cases and who knows how many we don’t know about.
The further we broaden police powers to dragnets the more innocent people will be within their crosshairs and have to be “filtered” out, often at the accused expense.
Next watch some “first day in jail” videos on Netflix and see the ridiculous stuff that gets people in scary overfilled jails, even for small even legitimate reasons and it’s enough to make it obvious there’s a serious problem with justice and law enforcement in the US.
One of the worst that affected me was an older middle class guy who ended up spending months in jail because he lost his job and at some point in the last 5yrs had a kid with some woman he met on a christian dating site who refused to have an abortion. The courts eventually ruled and said he owed $4k+ in child support in a short time span (a month?) otherwise you’re going to jail, when he was already struggling to live having lost his job. He was one of the few white guys, the stories of the black kids (most looked straight out of highschool) were often even smaller and even dumber reasons which immediately exposes them to living with other real criminals for extended periods of times which they then become friends with... etc.
The US is extremely punitive and the use of jails/prisons and stupid bail schemes is beyond excessive. That makes wrongful convictions all that much worse. Which all happens well before the trials even start.
I'm not denying the existence of false positives. They existed before geofence data and I don't think we have solid evidence on whether they are occurring more in geofence cases than they were before.
I'm not going to debate whether American jails need serious improvement. They obviously do. That's orthogonal to investigative techniques IMO.
I addressed the connection between the two multiple times in my comment. It’s highly relevant we can’t simply trust them with such a powerful tool than inherently includes countless innocent people.
I'm not sure what "two" you're referring to that you addressed the connection between. In any case I think we understand each other and just disagree, and that's fine. All the best.
The "two" are the use of technologies like geofence warrants and wrongful convictions or charges at the accused expense.
Geofence warrants seem too broad to me, providing them with access to people (and therefore probable cause for heavier warrants) merely for passing through an area of a crime.
Geofencing in this case directly led to the proper murder suspect. It was the technique that caught the right guy. The right guy was driving his relative's car and using the relative's old phone that he didn't sign out of, which led police to (entirely 100% legitimately) suspect the actual owner of both the car and the Google account. That was cleared up quite quickly, the right guy was arrested, all thanks to Good Guy Geofencing.
Where it went wrong is a completely orthogonal matter. He was kept in jail for days after it was crystal clear he's not the murderer, and his name was dragged through the mud also after that point. He's completely legitimately suing for that, and hopefully wins. But what does that have to do with a legitimate and effective use of his geolocation data? Again, a murderer is caught because of it. And then the same police department fucked up and ruined a legitimate and justified but innocent suspect's life.
> But what does that have to do with a legitimate and effective use of his geolocation data? Again, a murderer is caught because of it. And then the same police department fucked up and ruined a legitimate and justified but innocent suspect's life.
There is something fundamentally wrong with believing that the ends justify the means in these cases. As has been said, "[i]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." [1]
Your argument can be applied to absolutely every investigative technique. Neighbours were interviewed, a suspect was identified, and then something went wrong for unrelated reasons. Clearly the problem is the very idea of interviewing neighbours, so we must eradicate the technique for privacy reasons, because Blackstone ratio and justice for all. The argument that this case is about police geocasting holds about as much water.
The question then becomes: How much harm will society suffer if that shoplifter got away or the murderer was not caught? In the former case, the store's insurance policy should cover the loss and prices are increased to offset the loss, and the shoplifter may do it again. In the latter case, it's possible that the murderer may kill someone else.
But the overall rate of shoplifting and murder isn't going to change substantially even if the police ruin a residence and refuse to pay for damages or arrest and jail the wrong person for a substantial period of time.
So it appears that there a negligible increase in overall risk to society and property if criminals sometimes get away, but there doesn't appear to be any substantial decrease in overall risk to them if they're caught at great cost to certain innocent individuals.
In other words, there's really no difference on a societal level whether or not these individual cases result in the arrest and conviction of these criminals, but there's a substantial difference in personal cost for the innocent individuals who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
From the article it sounded like it wasn't just "who is this person we would like to question them", it was more along the lines of "we need access to this person's email and other data".
The former seems possibly okay to me, but the latter is definitely not.
