Why Does MNPD Need to Search Jocques Clemmons' Social Media?

Jocques ClemmonsPhoto: Black Lives Matter NashvilleAlex Little, a Nashville attorney with experience on both sides of the bar, offers a blunt response when asked why he was so stunned by the news that the Metro Nashville Police Department had obtained a warrant to dig through the social media accounts of Jocques Scott Clemmons.

“It’s highly irregular to conduct an investigation into someone who is dead,” he says.

Clemmons is not just a curious target for such scrutiny because he is dead, though. He was shot and killed by MNPD officer Josh Lippert last month, after Lippert attempted to stop him for running a stop sign and Clemmons tried to run away. Police say Clemmons had a handgun on him. The Tennessean broke the news today that, in the days following the shooting, MNPD sought and obtained warrants to search data from Clemmons' cell phone and social media accounts.

From that story:

Police leaders say the information is being sought as part of the department's thorough inquiry into the shooting, which is ongoing and separate from an investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. A representative of Clemmons' family says the information is not relevant and the requests were driven by an ulterior motive.

"I think they’re just trying to find something they can use against him," said Joy Kimbrough, a Nashville lawyer working with the family. "It wasn’t enough that they gunned him down.

"They just want to further assassinate his character."

Metro police officials say the information may answer lingering questions about Clemmons' encounter with Officer Josh Lippert.

It's not clear what questions about that fatal minute-long encounter could be answered by Clemmons' history on Instagram and Facebook.

“It smacks of, at least an appearance, of attempting to find dirt to present the decedent in a negative light,” Little says.

The Tennessean reports that Detective Danny Satterfield, a 22-year veteran of the department, wrote in the process of obtaining the warrants that "he is investigating the aggravated assault of Lippert." And initially, Metro police said — as the first-released piece of surveillance footage appeared to show — that Clemmons had charged at Lippert and made contact with him before turning and running the other way. After obtaining video from a different angle, though, MNPD acknowledged that no such attack had occurred, rather Clemmons appeared to be trying to run around Lippert. The warrants allowing the department to search Clemmons' social media accounts were obtained after that acknowledgment. 

“It does look like the affidavit may have some problems, but it’s really hard to tell what they knew at that time," Little says. "One reason it’s hard to tell is because this isn’t an active case. There’s no one who would be defending Clemmons.”

“The other problem, which is really, I think, a reason to be concerned as a Nashvillian is this isn’t an isolated incident, the attempt to sort of slander a victim of a police shooting. If you look at all the highly publicized cases, police departments have done a very good job of getting dirt out about them and that becomes part of the narrative. And it really has no place in the narrative. It doesn’t excuse the police’s behavior or justify anything that’s being done.” 

The news sparked discussion on social media Monday morning, including on Twitter where Little and another local attorney Daniel Horwitz expressed their shared outrage. Horwitz elaborates in an email to Pith.

"The government does not have the authority to rifle through a person's private records if it does not have a specific basis for believing that the records at issue contain information that is relevant to a pending investigation," he writes. "The MNPD's apparently unrestricted demand for 'all data' on Mr. Clemmons' social media accounts — which could conceivably date back as long as a decade or more — also strikes me as being extraordinarily and unconstitutionally overbroad. Based on the MNPD's statement that 'it is unknown whether [Mr. Clemmons'] social media posts or cellphone information might provide some insight,' it is not clear to me that the search warrants at issue were properly granted. Additionally, given that the officer's social media accounts do not seem to be under review as well, this seems disturbingly close to an attempt to impugn the decedent's character and deter citizens from complaining about police misconduct lest their most private and personal records be made public — something that is, to say the least, profoundly troubling."

MNPD spokesman Don Aaron told the daily that the department wanted to preserve Clemmons' social media data in case any of it turned out to relevant. 

"Social media accounts can be deleted quickly," Aaron said. "The MNPD sought to preserve the social media information until it could be reviewed and a determination made whether it contained any information that was germane to the investigation."

But Little suggests that's doing things in the wrong order.

“Don’t get me wrong, I fully support getting evidence where you can find it and there’s often a host of evidence in social accounts and particularly in cell phones," he says. "But you have to articulate a way that the evidence you’re looking for is connected to something you need to know and here they just haven’t done that. In the context of an individual who was shot by police and they’re essentially rifling through his personal documents, it’s incredibly troubling. The police department should be ashamed and they should withdraw this warrant before they go further.”

Pith asked Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk's office, as well as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for comment about whether they thought Clemmons' social media history was relevant to the investigation. TBI spokeswoman Susan Niland says the agency can not speak to "specific aspects involved" in an active and ongoing investigation.