CA Legislators Take Aim at Geofence / Reverse Keyword Search Warrants and Consent Searches

Editorial by Robert Phillips, Deputy District Attorney (Ret).
Special Attention Prosecutors & Law Enforcement Investigators / Patrol Officers

**UPDATED 06/052023:  From a subscriber: "The Assembly just took up AB 793. The author announced amendments that will limit its provisions only to reproductive health care and gender affirming care.  The amendments will be taken in the Senate.  With those amendments we won't have any other concerns.  This is a significant win for law enforcement."   And in an even more stunning development, AB93 (the bill aimed at banning consent as a valid basis for searches) has died. **

I recently briefed the Second District Court of Appeal (Div. 7) case of People v. Meza (Apr. 13, 2023) 90 Cal.App.5th 520, where the Appellate Court ruled unconstitutional one of the earlier attempts by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies to use a “geofence” warrant to identify two killers.  Despite the Fourth Amendment violations, the convictions of both defendants were upheld due to the deputies’ “good faith” as they experimented with something for which there was little or no precedent.  (See California Legal Update, Vol 28, #5; May 6, 2023, or www.legalupdates.com.)  The primary conclusion in Meza was that the warrant as written violated a number of constitutional rules on “particularity” and “scope,” giving the officers too much unfettered discretion in the information being sought. 

Well, as pointed out to me by a person well situated in California’s legal system (who wishes to remain anonymous), the constitutional requirement as described in Meza (and other cases) that a geofence warrant must be limited in particularity and scope wasn’t ....

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