SC: Looking at cell phone SIM card to get owner information off phone was reasonable

Defendant left his cell phone behind at the scene of an attempted murder. Police removed the SIM card solely to find the name of the owner, then they obtained a search warrant for the SIM card. The limited use of the SIM card just to find the owner was reasonable on the theory that the subscriber information isn’t really private anyway. Moreover, inevitable discovery applies because the victim’s phone had five recent calls to the defendant’s cell phone. State v. Moore, 2017 S.C. App. LEXIS 73 (Aug. 30, 2017). The state did not argue abandonment, and the same court held abandonment applied to a similar situation two years earlier in State v. Brown, 414 S.C. 14, 776 S.E.2d 917 (App. 2015). This case will be in the next supplement at new § 42.24[5].