According to Chaney, there’s a 48- to 72-hour window to access a phone using the fingerprint sensor. Police got the phone back within that window but after the body was released from state custody to the funeral home.
Sounds like there wasn’t an actual funeral in progress, but the body was being prepped. And it wasn’t outside of the window where a fingerprint couldn’t work.
A search of the linked article for “horror” turns up nothing, and a search of “family” turned up four results:
… the actions didn’t sit right with Phillip’s family.
“While the deceased person doesn’t have a vested interest in the remains of their body, the family sure does, so it really doesn’t pass the smell test,”
PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Family of man slain by Largo police officer speaks out.
“If I was writing the rules on this, it would be that the police would need a warrant in order to use a dead person’s finger to open up a phone, and I’d require notice to the family.”
And a search of “funeral” only turned up results paired with “home” as the location.
Poetic license, I guess? I’ll admit, it conjures up some offensive imagery, but it’s misleading. No, I’m not disappointed in boing boing.
As for what was done, I find it reprehensible, but they didn’t seek me out for my approval and were within the law so… we need to try to change the laws.
I think there’s a rule that says “don’t presume malice when simple stupidity will suffice.”
But in this case, I’m betting the assholes did it for sheer “Fuck you, because we’re cops and we can totally do this and get away with it and there’s not a god damn thing you can do about it!” value.
The “photo face unlock” thing was true for a short time back in 2011 - 7 years ago.
The modern Galaxy phones provide various levels of biometric authentication, with the highest level of authentication from the iris scanner and fingerprint reader. Facial recognition is still provided as an option for low level security as a convenience, but cannot be used to authenticate access to Samsung Pay or Secure Folder.
As for fingerprints, most Android phones use capacitive fingerprint readers (just like the iPhone), so dead fingers or print lifts won’t do any good.
Given that the action doesn’t make sense as an act of evidence collection (they could have done it while the body was in state custody), we should really view it as an act of intimidation.
Given the cops’ obvious disregard for everyone involved I guess we should be relieved they didn’t just show up with a pair of pruning shears to confiscate the finger for later use.
Yup. Most work on capacitance or radio frequency or both, neither of which work with dead tissue. In other words, you need a functional heart to unlock the phone, which the cops naturally lack.
The Largo Detectives may have felt there was a historical precedence with concern to the post-humous trial of Pope Formosus back in 897
“The damnatio memoriae, an old judicial practice from Ancient Rome, was applied to Formosus, all his measures and acts were annulled and the orders conferred by him were declared invalid. The papal vestments were torn from his body, the three fingers from his right hand that he had used in consecrations were cut off”
When I saw an early headline for this story, it was something along the lines of, “Cops go to funeral parlor to use killed man’s fingerprints to unlock his phone.” I was thinking they discreetly popped into the place to unlock his phone to help solve his murder. But no, they’re the ones that killed him, they did it in the most disruptive way possible, and they’re essentially looking for evidence that allows them to justify killing him (even though it won’t).
I have to say, “the dead have no expectation of privacy” is one thing, but “we get to do whatever we want with a corpse that’s not even in our care” seems like a different, questionable assertion entirely. If the corpse is not a person but property, then surely it is, at that point, property belonging to someone else which requires a warrant if the cops want access to it? (And if the funeral parlor granted access without the family’s permission, that seems potentially problematic as well.)
Sounds like the cops didn’t have the phone and the body at the same time for some reason (and the body got passed on very quickly, which is odd considering he was murdered).
Some Monday morning quarterbacking here: An interesting move would have been to shut that casket (cops didn’t have a warrant and the legal experts weren’t brought in until later), inter their loved one ASAP, and thereby force the cops to jump through hoops for a court order for exhumation (which don’t happen overnight especially when opposed by the survivors). By the time they got into step three, perhaps a little light bulb would have come on re any possibility of a read off a decaying corpse’s finger.
