NJ Supreme Court ruled that compelling a suspect to unlock their cell phone doesn't violate Fifth Amendment, following opposite ruling by Indiana SC in June
Courts are split on whether phone unlocking orders violate the Fifth Amendment. — New Jersey's Supreme Court has ruled …
Context & Ripple Effects
New Jersey's Supreme Court has now put itself on the opposite side of a question state high courts keep answering differently: whether police can compel a suspect to unlock a phone without violating the Fifth Amendment. Two months ago, the [[a:955036|Indiana Supreme Court sided with a woman jailed for contempt after refusing to unlock her phone]], and last fall the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a lower-court order demanding a computer password — both treating compelled disclosure as testimony.
The split runs deeper than passcodes: a 2016 case in which an LA judge compelled a woman to unlock her iPhone with her fingerprint framed the same debate for biometrics, and earlier rulings had already treated forced password disclosure as unconstitutional. With state supreme courts now issuing directly contradictory answers within weeks of each other, the stage is set for the question to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
First-order effects
- New Jersey defendants who refuse to unlock their phones can now be held in contempt, and NJ prosecutors gain a coercive tool that their Indiana counterparts just lost.
Second-order effects
- The direct conflict with Indiana's ruling gives defense attorneys and prosecutors a reason to shop for favorable venues, and hands the U.S. Supreme Court a clean circuit-style split to resolve.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, compelled decryption — passcodes and biometrics alike — gets settled nationally rather than state by state, determining whether the Fifth Amendment's act-of-production doctrine extends to the contents of locked devices.
The trend: State supreme courts are splintering over whether forcing suspects to unlock their devices is compelled testimony, pushing the Fifth Amendment question toward U.S. Supreme Court review.