If you’re like most people, you probably carry your cellphone with you almost everywhere you go. However, you’re not going to want to do that if you plan on committing a particularly serious crime, especially now that the Minnesota Appeals Court has upheld the legality of “geofence warrants.”
Geofencing involves the creation of a virtual perimeter, and it’s used in different industries in a variety of ways. Most commonly it is used by marketing companies to push certain advertisements to individuals within a specific area. For example, a local ice cream shop may push more social ads to individuals within five miles of their store when the weather gets over 85 degrees.
Geofencing has also become quite popular in forensics and criminal law. When used in this manner, cellphone companies can track which mobile users enter or exit a specific boundary during certain times. The technology was actually used during a pretty recent case, and the interpretation of the legality of these warrants will continue to draw questions from all sides. Let’s take a closer look at one of the cases that pushed geofence warrants to the forefront.
Geofence Murder Case
Manuel Mandujano was reported missing to Minneapolis police on April 7, 2021. Nine days later Mandujano’s body was found face down with his hands tied behind his back in a large drainage culvert. Police ruled the case a homicide and began looking for suspects.
A detective sought a geofence warrant in order to pull anonymous information from Google about cellphones that were in the area where the body was found. More specifically, the warrant sought location-history data for devices within a 65-foot-wide by 290-foot-long geofence. Any cell phone that entered or exited this geofence area was logged, and these logs were given to police. The vast majority of devices that were captured in the data were not within the geofence boundary for long, however, one device stuck out to the detective because it “pinged” within the geofence 46 times in 10 minutes on March 29, 2021, four days after Mandujano had been seen by family, and some of the pings were essentially on top of where the body was found.
This information, coupled with surveillance footage from a nearby gas station, led police to believe that the device’s owner was likely involved in the murder or body disposal. Police then filed a new search warrant to get identifying information about the owner of the suspicious device. Information provided by Google led them to a man named Ivan Contreras-Sanchez.
Contreras moved to suppress all evidence obtained from the geofence warrant, but the court denied the motion, and he was eventually found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 480 months in prison. His attorney argued that his right to unreasonable searches was violated, while the prosecution stated that anonymous cell phone data is a non-living item with no Fourth Amendment rights. The Court of Appeals sided with the prosecution and upheld the verdict, but they did not say that geofence warrants can be used carte blance, rather, their use and constitutionality must be evaluated on a case by case basis.
It’s certainly an interesting case, and we want to know what the public thinks. Are you cool with your anonymous data being collected if it helps keep more rapists and murderers off the streets, or do you see it as a slippery slope towards a violation of your right to privacy and freedom from illegal searches? Let us know what you think on our socials, and if you need help with a criminal matter, reach out to Avery and the team at Appelman Law Firm today at (952) 224-2277.
