Cert Petitions: March 4, 2019

Granted

Mobley v. The State, Case No. S18C1546. In the Court of Appeals,  case no. A18A0500, the Court held that, as matter of first impression,  a defendant does not have reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to data captured by his vehicle's airbag control module, and thus retrieval of such data is not a search or seizure protected by the Fourth Amendment. See 346 Ga.App. 641 (2018).

On December 15, 2014, the vehicle driven by Victor Lamont Mobley collided with another vehicle, killing both the driver and the passenger. . . Mobley was charged with reckless driving, two counts of homicide by vehicle in the first degree and speeding. Mobley moved to suppress evidence that was obtained from the airbag control module (“ACM”) in the vehicle he was driving, which showed that the vehicle was traveling at a speed of 97 miles per hour five seconds before airbag deployment. After conducting a hearing, the trial court denied his motion. In its order denying Mobley’s motion to suppress, the trial court found that it did not have to reach the issue of whether a search warrant was required to access the data from the ACM in the vehicle driven by Mobley, because a search warrant was obtained the day after the data was accessed and the data in the ACM would have inevitably been discovered “when the ACMs were properly removed from the vehicle pursuant to the search warrant[ ].” Following a bench trial on June 6, 2017, Mobley was found guilty on all counts. 

Based on differing rationales, the Court of Appeals affirmed. That court reasoned that 

"[w]hile an outside observer cannot ascertain the information regarding the use and functioning of a vehicle with the same level of precision as that captured by the ACM, there are outward manifestations of the functioning of some of the vehicle’s systems when a vehicle is operated on public roads. For example, a member of the public can observe a vehicle’s approximate speed; observe whether a vehicle’s brakes are being employed by seeing the vehicle slow down or stop or the brake lights come on, by hearing the sounds of sudden braking; and observe whether the driver is wearing a seatbelt. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in such information because an individual knowingly exposes such information to the public." 346 Ga. App. at 646. The court went on to distinguish the type of information contained in ACMs from more sensitive information like the contents of cellphones or long term tracking information of GPS devices. 

All the Justices concurred in granting the petition, except Bethel, J., dissenting. 

The case will be assigned to the June 2019 oral argument calendar automatically under Supreme Court Rule 50 (2).  

The questions presented in Mobley are: 

1. Did the search and seizure of the airbag control module violate the Fourth Amendment?
2. If so, was the evidence obtained from the search admissible under the inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule as a matter of federal constitutional law?
3. If so, did OCGA § 17-5-30, as construed by this Court in Gary v. State, 262 Ga. 573 (1992), preclude admission of the evidence?
4. If so, should this Court continue to follow Gary v. State, 262 Ga. 573 (1992), in construing OCGA § 17-5-30?

Questions 3 and 4 pertain to the Georgia Supreme Court's decision in Gary v. State, 262 Ga. 573 (1992), which held that OCGA § 17-5-30 precludes the use of a "good faith" exception to the exclusionary rule as a matter of state law. The Court of Appeals opinion noted (and the two concurring opinions principally advocated) that even if the collection of ACMs were a "search," the evidence would still have been admissible under the "inevitable discovery" exception to the exclusionary rule.  Based on questions 3-4, it appears the Court will consider whether Georgia law allows for any exceptions to the exclusionary rule. 

Denied

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