The State Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could define how police are allowed to search and use cell phones as part of their investigations.
George Burch was convicted in 2018 in the murder of Nichole VanderHeyden in Green Bay. Police caught Burch by connecting him to the case with the use of cell phone data that they had gathered from him while downloading his text messages several months before in an unrelated case.
At issue is whether or not police should have retained that phone data past the point of the previous investigation. There’s also a discussion to what extent police can actually search your phone when you give consent to only parts of the data on the device.
