Cases to Watch: Mobley v. State

Mobley is a 4th amendment case argued this past week, dealing with whether  a defendant has a reasonable expectation of privacy in data captured by his vehicle's airbag control module. See 346 Ga.App. 641 (2018).

Background  

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. 

Proceedings Below 

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. 



Oral Argument

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