Franklin v. State

Marco Franklin was convicted of felony murder and firearm possession after Jamarco Royal, a drug dealer, was shot and killed during what evidence suggested was a planned robbery. Police found a phone dropped near the scene that led them to Franklin, and later searched a second phone (an iPhone) found at his mother's house under a warrant. On appeal, Franklin argued his trial lawyer was constitutionally ineffective for not asking the court to suppress evidence from both phones. He said the first phone was searched without a warrant and the second was searched under a warrant that was too broad. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed on both points, finding that Franklin had abandoned the first phone by leaving it behind while fleeing, and that the warrant for the second phone was similar to warrants the court had previously upheld, so his lawyer was not deficient for not challenging either search.

Trial counsel was not ineffective because a motion to suppress the abandoned Motorola phone would not have succeeded, and a particularity challenge to the iPhone warrant, based on a case decided after Franklin's trial, was not available under the law that existed at the time.

The ruling clarifies that people who abandon phones or other property while fleeing a crime scene generally lose Fourth Amendment protection over that property, and it shows that defense lawyers are not considered ineffective for failing to raise search-warrant arguments that later legal decisions, but not prior law, would support.

Affirmed

1. To win an ineffective-assistance claim, a defendant must show both that his lawyer's performance was unreasonably deficient and that the outcome of the trial likely would have been different, and if either part fails the whole claim fails.
2. When a lawyer's alleged mistake is not filing a motion to suppress evidence, the defendant must strongly show that the evidence actually would have been thrown out if the lawyer had asked.
3. Abandoned property loses Fourth Amendment protection (the constitutional shield against unreasonable searches) when a person gives up any reasonable expectation of privacy in it; Franklin dropped the Motorola phone while running from the shooting and never tried to get it back, and he even replaced it with another phone, so the court found he had abandoned it.
4. Because prior Georgia cases had already held that dropping property while fleeing counts as abandonment, a motion to suppress the Motorola phone evidence would not clearly have succeeded, so the lawyer's failure to file one was not deficient performance.
5. On the iPhone, the search warrant limited officers to data 'important to the investigation of murder,' language that earlier Georgia Supreme Court decisions had accepted as specific enough to satisfy the particularity requirement (the rule that warrants must clearly describe what can be searched); a later decision striking down broader warrants came out only after Franklin's trial, so his lawyer could not have been expected to rely on it.

• felony murder conviction
• ineffective assistance of counsel
• cell phone search warrant
• abandoned property
• Fourth Amendment