But the increasingly thin line between 'reality' and digital life is becoming a source of knowledge with far reaching legal, social, political and financial rights. JL
Thomas Brewster reports in Forbes:
With the (accused) providing no clear motivation for his alleged actions, the FBI are carrying out a search on the suspect’s iPhone 11. The reason for searching the iPhone is to find any signs of an “intent, plan or motive to kill or harm any person or his mental state.” The mental state of the accused could determine the nature and severity of the charge they face, and penalty they could receive at trial. Messages, internet searches, photos and videos all point to what’s happening in the human psyche. Whether or not it’s disturbed, in the eyes of the law, is for a professional psychologist to determine and for a judge to rule on.In January, police followed up a call about a stabbing in the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, Arizona. The call had come from a woman who’d said her grandmother had been stabbed by her brother, a former Marine who had served in communications off the coast of Iran and Syria, and was once called “an American hero” by Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar. (Forbes is choosing not to publish the name of the suspect, due to the familial sensitivities of the crime.) When police apprehended the brother, he was covered in blood. And when they went inside the property he had just exited, they found an elderly woman in the living room with multiple puncture wounds on her chest, abdomen, hands, arms, back and face. “I estimated that there were 40 to 50 puncture wounds on her body,” wrote FBI agent Michael Carter in a search warrant application. (While it will only look into homicides without a federal connection in certain circumstances, the FBI does typically investigate murders on Indian reservations.)
During a subsequent interview, the suspect said repeatedly that he had snapped and started stabbing his grandmother for no reason, according to the warrant. Carter asked the interviewee how many times he believed he’d stabbed his grandma, to which he responded, “Maybe 53.” Another interviewer asked what he had been feeling during the stabbing, to which he replied, “Nothing.” When Carter asked what he was feeling as he was being interviewed, the suspect said, “No remorse.”
With the interviewee providing no clear motivation for his alleged actions, the FBI are carrying out a search on the suspect’s iPhone 11, a device from which the feds have previously harvested data, even when it was locked. At the top of the list of reasons for searching the iPhone is to find any signs of an “intent, plan or motive to kill or harm any person, his mens rea, or his mental state.” Mens rea is the awareness of wrongdoing in the act of committing a crime; in other words, criminal intent.
The mental state of the accused could determine the nature and severity of the charge they face, and penalty they could receive at trial. Arizona judges can impose the death penalty for first-degree murder sentences but the state has suspended executions since 2014.
Though it’s common for the FBI to look for incriminating evidence of mens rea when looking through suspects’ electronic devices, it’s rare for the FBI to explicitly state it is looking for signs of sanity from the search of a phone. This disturbing case shows just how much federal investigators think modern smartphones can reveal about a person and their mental state. That’s why it’s become so crucial for the FBI to hack into phones—either on its own or with help from contractors—and especially those with heightened security like modern iPhones. Once inside, they can forensically pick through all the data within.
It’s unclear if the FBI had to break into the phone or if the suspect let them into his iPhone. The search warrant only notes that when the agent collected the device, he put it in flight mode. Police typically do that to keep the phone in a state that’s as close to what it was when first discovered, and to prevent any attempts for anyone to remotely manipulate data on the device. Neither the defendant’s lawyer nor the Justice Department are commenting on the case. Whatever they did to get into the iPhone, investigators can expect a lot of information from the device: They were able to get a complete extraction of data from the iPhone and are picking through everything from the last year.
What does your iPhone say about you?
The case also leads to a bigger, more existential question: How much can your phone and your data reveal about your mental health? And could the government use that against you?
If the phone indicates a suspected murderer was not in his right mind, it could work in his favor. “There could be information on his phone of schizophrenia, that he was paranoid,” says Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist and professor at Walden University in Minneapolis. “Was there anything that led up to the killing to suggest that he was having some mental health issues and that he was reaching out to a doctor? Maybe he was expressing his paranoia in emails to other people. So all those things could then suggest that there were things going on with him and it might mitigate the actual conviction that maybe he was responsible for the killing, but he wasn't criminally responsible.”
Peter Sommer, professor of digital forensics at Birmingham University in the U.K., says lawyers can look at phones for signs of other conditions, such as autism. “If we’re looking at an autism defense . . . you can hand the email files or social messaging [data] over to a psychotherapist, and he’d say, ‘Yes, I can spot the following characteristics as being indicative of autism.’
“You might say, ‘Look, there’s a large quantity of highly geeky stuff, there’s an absence of references to relationships with other human beings, some of the material is being collected with a great level of detail.’ That would seem to point toward someone being on the autism spectrum.”
From the other side, the FBI will be looking for any evidence the suspect had premeditated or planned his actions. Within the same search warrant is a screenshot provided by a relative of the defendant, showing a conversation he had with his daughter, shortly before his grandma was stabbed to death. In his messages, he said: “Hey baby I miss you and I’ll miss you.” In another: “I’m going away a long time.” When his daughter started panicking about her dad’s messages, he said he didn’t mean to scare her and that he was going “nowhere rn [right now].”
Not that the phone would ever be the sole source of evidence that someone was in their right mind when committing an act of violence. Phone history can only go so far; personal history may provide more clues. Hickey recalls another case where a grandson killed his grandma. When Hickey asked the killer what the victim would do if their grandmother was in the room, he said he’d do it again, because she had abused him as a child. “It was definitely a rage killing.”
But in some ways, one can think of the phone as a mirror of the mind. All those messages, internet searches, photos and videos all point to what’s happening in the human psyche. Whether or not it’s disturbed, in the eyes of the law, that’s for a professional psychologist to determine and for a judge to rule on.
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