## Facts

- Indiana State Police stopped a blue-and-white car because its license plate was registered to a different-colored vehicle.
- Jermaine L. Smith, the car’s owner, was seated in the front passenger seat.
- Officers asked for permission to search the vehicle for “guns, drugs, money, or illegal contraband,” and Smith consented.
- During the search, officers found two cellular flip phones; Smith said one belonged to his girlfriend.
- An officer conducted a “short-out” field test on each phone by accessing the internal electronic serial number (ESN) and comparing it to the ESN printed on the phone’s exterior.
- The internal ESNs did not match the external ESNs, indicating the phones were “cloned” so charges would be billed to another person’s account.
- Officers confirmed through a law-enforcement hotline that the number associated with the phone Smith attributed to his girlfriend belonged to a legitimate GTE Mobilnet customer.
- Smith admitted he knew the phone was cloned.
- The State charged Smith with Class D felony theft for knowingly exerting unauthorized control over another person’s cellular service.

## Issues

1. Whether accessing a cellular phone’s internal ESN and comparing it to the external ESN during a consent search constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and the Indiana Constitution.
2. If it is a search, whether the ESN field test was unreasonable or exceeded the scope of Smith’s consent to search the vehicle for contraband.

## Decision

- The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed Smith’s theft conviction.
- The court upheld denial of Smith’s motion to suppress and admission of the phone-related evidence.
- The court concluded the ESN field test did not violate the Fourth Amendment or the Indiana Constitution because it was within the objective scope of Smith’s consent and/or did not invade a reasonable expectation of privacy.

## Legal Principles

- Consent is an exception to the warrant requirement; the scope of consent is evaluated by objective reasonableness based on what a typical person would have understood from the exchange.
- A general consent to search a vehicle for contraband permits examination of items found inside that could reasonably relate to illegal activity sought by the search.
- Accessing a technical identifier routinely conveyed to third parties in ordinary use (such as a phone’s ESN transmitted to the carrier) supports a reduced expectation of privacy compared to the content of communications.
- A limited, technical “field test” that reveals only whether an item has an illicit characteristic may be treated as a minimal intrusion when officers are lawfully present and acting within consent.

## Conclusion

Because Smith consented to a contraband search and the ESN “short-out” procedure was a limited technical check tied to identifying illegal use of the phones, the court held the test was constitutionally permissible and affirmed the theft conviction based on the cloned-phone evidence and Smith’s admissions.


Smith v. State, 713 N.E.2d 338 (Ind. Ct. App. 1999)