Jenkinsv.State
Terry Elmore Malik Jenkins was convicted by a Morgan County jury of home invasion, hijacking a motor vehicle, and armed robbery after a spree that began with a car theft in South Carolina, continued with an armed robbery at a Henry County gas station, and ended with the shooting of an elderly man in his garage as the attackers took his car. Before trial, investigators obtained a warrant for Jenkins’s Facebook account seeking account data since its creation and ten months of private messages, and the trial court ultimately refused to suppress the results. The Court of Appeals of Georgia held that the warrant was unconstitutionally overbroad and the Facebook records should have been suppressed, but that their admission was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Applying State v. Wilson, the court concluded that the warrant’s reference to “the illegal activities” the suspects were involved in did not confine the search to the offenses described in the affidavit, and that a ten-month window of messages outran probable cause for crimes committed over a few days, with nothing in the record justifying that breadth. The error was harmless because identification testimony, surveillance video of a distinctive neon hoodie, cell-phone location data, and robbery proceeds found on Jenkins overwhelmingly proved guilt, and the messages were cumulative. The court also treated Jenkins’s identity and ineffective-assistance arguments as abandoned for lack of supporting argument, and added that an attached garage sharing walls and a roof with the house was a dwelling for home-invasion purposes.
Loading published copy…

