MD: Police seized defendant’s cell phone but didn’t search it; writing down numbers that called wasn’t unreasonable

Defendant was first handcuffed and then unhandcuffed and came in to give a statement on an execution style murder. The officers retained his cell phone. He filled out an information sheet and talked with the officers. As his phone rang, one officer wrote down the numbers calling but didn’t answer the phone or search it. Then the police got his phone records from the number he gave. That led to the police finding things, and it was all reasonably done. The seizure of the cell phone was not unreasonable because it wasn’t searched. Williams v. State, 2014 Md. App. LEXIS 14 (February 26, 2014) (another colorful Moylan opinion; and, considering how it starts, you get the drift of where it’s going):

The appellant does not challenge the legal sufficiency of the evidence to prove his guilt. The four contentions he does make could readily be resolved in an evidentiary vacuum. Some factual context may nonetheless help to convey the outrageous character of a retaliatory execution perpetrated in the parking garage of the Towson Town Mall during the busy pre-Christmas season.

. . .

The information that the appellant argues should have been suppressed falls into two categories. The first is the phone number of the appellant’s cellphone itself. By itself, it has no inculpatory significance. Derivatively, however, it could have facilitated the police request to the telephone company for the company’s records of the appellant’s cellphone use. When the appellant first sat down for his interview with Detective Lambert, however, the appellant freely provided his cellphone number on the personal information sheet he filled out. When the police subsequently asked the phone company for the appellant’s cellphone records, even assuming they needed his cellphone number to make the initial request, they had it from the independent source as well as from looking at the cellphone itself. This is a classic application of the independent source principle.

The second category of evidence the appellant wanted suppressed consisted of the cellphone numbers, and the identity of the owners of the cellphones, who had called the appellant or whom the appellant had called during the critical late afternoon hours on December 19, 2011. During the late evening of December 19, Officer Jednorski had jotted down the numbers of those calling the appellant. The telephone company, on the other hand, had those numbers and others independently in its own recorded database. As part of the ongoing investigation of this case, Detective Lambert obtained a judicially issued court order for the phone company to produce the company’s records of calls to and from the appellant’s cellphone. The phone company complied with that order and produced the requested records. At trial, Detective Lambert and Detective Chuck Gruss provided the jury with detailed descriptions of the cellphone records not only of the appellant but also of Jermell Brandon, William Ward, Crystal Harris, and Marilyn “Baby Sis” Hollemand, all of whom were in regular contact with each other before, during, and after the shooting of Rodney Pridget. This detailed analysis was based on the telephone company records, not on the observations of Officer Jednorski. The source of the information was an independent source not subject to Fourth Amendment exclusion. Thus, the independent source alternative route takes us safely around the search incident quagmire. Evidence of the various phone calls was properly not suppressed.