A Virginia man was convicted of throwing a woman out of a moving car after Google answered a reverse keyword search warrant.
Willie James Clements Jr. was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident and aggravated malicious wounding after an incident that took place in 2022.
M.K. was stumbling outside a bar in Arlington at 2:20 in the morning. She was waiting for a rideshare, but she stepped into the front seat of Clements’ Chevrolet Traverse SUV instead.
A witness reported “something thrown out of the car,” which had been traveling at 50 mph. The witness saw that it was a woman. She had been driven a half a mile past her house before she was ejected.
She had left her phone inside the car. The phone location data led police to the SUV, which was registered to Clements.
Police reasoned that the driver must have entered her address into a search, so they obtained a keyword search warrant for anyone who had searched for M.K.’s address.
Clements owned the only Google account that appeared in the search. He had also searched for “Any suspect in Arlington VA News, Police, Woman Jumps out of Vehicle.”
Clements moved to suppress the Google evidence, citing the reasonable expectation of privacy over his search. The judge denied the motion, and he was convicted.
Clements appealed, but the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled that the Google search results were properly admitted into evidence.
Judge Dominique Callins stated that police had probable cause for the Google search.
“The investigating officers knew that M.K. did not know the suspect, and so the suspect would not have known her address,” she wrote. “Since M.K. was extremely intoxicated, police knew she likely would not have been able to provide the suspect with directions.
“As a result, the police could reasonably conclude that the suspect would have had to search M.K.’s address to have driven past her home,” Callins added. “Absent evidence that M.K. used her own cellphone to provide navigation, the magistrate could reasonably infer that the suspect used a search application on their phone to navigate to M.K.’s home.”
The judge also refuted Clements’s argument that the evidence failed to prove that he had caused M.K.’s injuries.
“The jury heard testimony and viewed video evidence showing the driver of the vehicle pushing M.K. from the car, from which she fell headfirst onto the concrete,” Callins wrote. “M.K. had injuries to the back of her head and scuffs on the sides of her shoes, consistent with Clements pushing her from the moving car. Taken together with evidence that Clements searched for M.K.’s address just prior to the incident, a reasonable factfinder could conclude that Clements pushed M.K. out of the car, causing her injuries.”
Judge Chaney wrote a concurring opinion, but he said reverse keyword search results should have been suppressed.
“I would hold only that, on this record, the warrant lacked particularized probable cause connecting Google user data to the suspected offender and authorized a search that worked backward from a search term to a suspect,” Chaney stated. “The affidavit needed some fact linking the suspected use of navigation specifically to Google’s records.”
