In September 2006, Matthew Wilhelm, a 25-year-old mechanical engineering graduate who worked for Caterpillar, was cycling on the shoulder of a two-lane highway east of Urbana when he was fatally struck from behind. Police said the driver, 19-year-old Jennifer Stark, was downloading a ringtone on her cell phone at the time, and she was so far off the road that she hit Wilhelm with the driver’s side of the car. She had three recent convictions for speeding and blowing a red light.
And yet in 2014 there were 3,179 people killed and an estimated 431,000 injured in crashes involving distracted drivers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“Just like any search warrant, [the Major Accidents division] has to go through an approval process, and the orders aren’t always granted,” Estrada says.
This process is the same for state troopers, according to Illinois State Police spokesman Matt Boerwinkle. While investigators will try to access phone records if there’s evidence that distracted driving was a factor in a crash, they don’t do so after every serious collision.
That likely means that it would be difficult if not impossible to waive the necessity of court permission to search a phone after a major crash. Still, I’d argue that law enforcement agencies could develop policies whereby the warrants were automatically requested after major crashes, even if the courts ultimately decided not to grant them for lack of evidence.
