CHUTICH, Justice.
This case presents an issue of first impression: whether the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination protects a person from being ordered to provide a fingerprint to unlock a seized cellphone. Neither the Supreme Court of the United States nor any state supreme court has addressed this issue.
The police lawfully seized a cellphone from appellant Matthew Diamond, a burglary suspect, and attempted to execute a valid warrant to search the cellphone. The cellphone's fingerprint-scanner security lock, however, prevented the search, and Diamond refused to unlock the cellphone with his fingerprint, asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
A homeowner in Chaska returned home to find that someone had kicked open her attached garage's side-entry door, entered her home, and taken jewelry, electronics, and a safe. When police officers arrived to investigate the burglary, they discovered two key pieces of evidence: shoe tread prints on the side-entry door, and, on the driveway, an envelope with the name "S.W." written on it. A Chaska investigator determined that S.W. had sold jewelry to a pawnshop on the same day as the burglary, and the investigator obtained the license plate number of a car registered in S.W.'s name. Officers then located and stopped S.W.'s car; Diamond was driving the car, and S.W. was a passenger. Police officers arrested Diamond on outstanding warrants and took him to jail, where jail personnel collected and stored his shoes and a Samsung Galaxy 5 cellphone that he was carrying when arrested.
Police officers obtained and executed warrants to seize Diamond's shoes and cellphone. In addition, they obtained a warrant to search the contents of the cell-phone. But they could not search its contents because the cellphone required a fingerprint to unlock it.
The district court concluded that compelling Diamond's fingerprint would not violate his Fifth Amendment privilege because "[c]ompelling the production of [Diamond's] fingerprint or thumbprint would not call upon the use of [his] mind. It is more akin to providing a key to a lockbox." Accordingly, it ordered Diamond to "provide a fingerprint or thumbprint as deemed necessary by the Chaska Police Department to unlock his seized cell phone."
Diamond continued to object to providing the necessary fingerprint for unlocking the phone. Nevertheless, he finally unlocked the cellphone with his fingerprint in court after being held in civil contempt and warned of the possibility and consequences of criminal contempt. Police officers used forensic analysis software to search and to extract the cellphone's data, including call records and messages sent and received from the cellphone. The data showed frequent communication between S.W. and Diamond on the day of the burglary.
During the jury trial, the district court admitted the messages and call logs from the search of the cellphone, but to avoid Fifth Amendment concerns, it prohibited the parties from introducing evidence that Diamond had unlocked the phone with his fingerprint. The court also admitted inculpatory evidence unrelated to the contents of the cellphone, which showed that Diamond
The court of appeals affirmed, concluding that providing a fingerprint was not privileged under the Fifth Amendment because it was "no more testimonial than furnishing a blood sample, providing handwriting or voice exemplars, standing in a lineup, or wearing particular clothing." State v. Diamond, 890 N.W.2d 143, 151 (Minn. App. 2017).
We granted Diamond's petition for review.
The question this case poses arises under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. We review this constitutional question de novo.
The Fifth Amendment, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 8, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964), provides that "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself," U.S. Const. amend. V; see also Minn. Const. art. I, § 7.
The privilege against self-incrimination bars the state from (1) compelling a defendant (2) to make a testimonial communication to the state (3) that is incriminating. See Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 408, 96 S.Ct. 1569, 48 L.Ed.2d 39 (1976). Because we conclude that the act of
The Fifth Amendment bars a state from compelling oral and physical testimonial communications from a defendant. Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 763-64, 86 S.Ct. 1826 ("It is clear that the protection of the privilege reaches an accused's communications, whatever form they might take, and the compulsion of responses which are also communications, for example, compliance with a subpoena to produce one's papers."). A physical act is testimonial when the act is a communication that "itself, explicitly or implicitly, relate[s] a factual assertion or disclose[s] information." Doe v. United States (Doe II), 487 U.S. 201, 209-10, 108 S.Ct. 2341, 101 L.Ed.2d 184 (1988). For example, complying with a subpoena to produce documents "may implicitly communicate `statements of fact'" because complying with a court order may communicate the existence of evidence, the possession or control of evidence, or authenticate evidence.
But an act is not testimonial when the act provides "real or physical evidence" that is "used solely to measure... physical properties," United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1, 7, 93 S.Ct. 764, 35 L.Ed.2d 67 (1973), or to "exhibit ... physical characteristics," United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218, 222, 87 S.Ct. 1926, 18 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1967). The government can compel a defendant to act when the act presents the "body as evidence when it may be material." Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 763, 86 S.Ct. 1826 (quoting Holt v. United States, 218 U.S. 245, 252-53, 31 S.Ct. 2, 54 S.Ct. 1021 (1910)). In other words, the government may compel a defendant to "exhibit himself" and present his "features" so that the police or a jury may "compare his features" with other evidence of the defendant's guilt. Holt, 218 U.S. at 253, 31 S.Ct. 2; State v. Williams, 307 Minn. 191, 239 N.W.2d 222, 225-26 (1976) (holding that an order to "put on a hat found at the scene of the crime" was not testimonial because the police compelled the physical act for "the sole purpose of attempting to prove [the defendant's] ownership of [an] incriminating article").
The Supreme Court of the United States has therefore drawn a distinction between the testimonial act of producing documents as evidence and the nontestimonial act of producing the body as evidence. The Court first held that the compelled exhibition of the body's characteristics was not testimonial under the Fifth Amendment in Holt, 218 U.S. at 252, 31 S.Ct. 2. The Court explained that it would be an "extravagant extension of the 5th Amendment" to prevent a jury from hearing a witness testify that a prisoner, who was compelled to put on clothes, did so and that the clothes fit him. Id. It reasoned that barring the testimony would, in essence, "forbid a jury" from looking "at a prisoner and compar[ing] his features with a photograph in proof." Id. at 253, 31 S.Ct. 2;
In Schmerber, the Supreme Court relied on Holt to hold that providing a blood sample to the police for an alcohol-content analysis was a nontestimonial act. 384 U.S. at 765, 86 S.Ct. 1826. The Court reasoned that neither the extraction of the blood sample nor the later chemical analysis of the blood sample showed "even a shadow of testimonial compulsion" or "communication by the accused." Id. It emphasized that the defendant's "testimonial capacities" were not involved and "his participation, except as a donor, was irrelevant to the results of the test, which depend[ed] on [the] chemical analysis and on that alone." Id. Accordingly, the Court adopted the reasoning of the federal and state courts that distinguished between compelled acts that make a "suspect or an accused the source of real or physical evidence" and compelled acts that elicit testimonial responses. Id. at 764, 86 S.Ct. 1826 (internal quotation marks omitted). Courts applying this distinction, it noted, had held that the Fifth Amendment "offers no protection against compulsion to submit to fingerprinting, photographing, or measurements, to write or speak for identification, to appear in court, to stand, to assume a stance, to walk, or to make a particular gesture." Id. at 764, 86 S.Ct. 1826.
Although the Supreme Court's distinction between the testimonial act of producing documents as evidence and the nontestimonial act of producing the body as evidence is helpful to our analysis, the act here — providing the police a fingerprint to unlock a cellphone — does not fit neatly into either category. Unlike the acts of standing in a lineup or providing a blood, voice, or handwriting sample, providing a fingerprint to unlock a cellphone both exhibits the body (the fingerprint) and produces documents (the contents of the cellphone). Providing a fingerprint gives the government access to the phone's contents that it did not already have, and the act of unlocking the cellphone communicates some degree of possession, control, and authentication of the cellphone's contents. See Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 36, 120 S.Ct. 2037. But producing a fingerprint to unlock a phone, unlike the act of producing documents, is a display of the physical characteristics of the body, not of the mind, to the police. See Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 763, 86 S.Ct. 1826.
Because we conclude that producing a fingerprint is more like exhibiting the body than producing documents, we hold that providing a fingerprint to unlock a cellphone is not a testimonial communication under the Fifth Amendment. The police compelled Diamond's fingerprint for the fingerprint's physical characteristics and not for any implicit testimony from the act of providing the fingerprint. See Dionisio, 410 U.S. at 7, 93 S.Ct. 764. Moreover, the fingerprint was physical evidence from Diamond's body, not evidence of his mind's thought processes. See Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 43, 120 S.Ct. 2037. We reach this conclusion for two reasons.
First, the State compelled Diamond to provide his fingerprint only for the physical, identifying characteristics of Diamond's fingerprint, not any communicative testimony inherent in providing the fingerprint. The State's use of Diamond's fingerprint was therefore like a "test" to gather
The characterization of the act throughout this case's proceedings supports this conclusion. The district court's order compelled Diamond to "provide a fingerprint or thumbprint as deemed necessary by the Chaska Police Department" — a part of his body — to the police so that the police could unlock the cellphone. At the contempt hearing, the district court instructed the State to "take whatever samples it needed" to unlock the cellphone. Moreover, the State did not present evidence at trial that Diamond unlocked the cellphone with his fingerprint.
Second, Diamond's act of providing a fingerprint to the police was not testimonial because the act did not reveal the contents of Diamond's mind. See 3 Wayne R. LaFave et al., Criminal Procedure § 8.12(d) (4th ed. 2016) ("Schmerber limited any `private inner sanctum' protected by the privilege to that of the contents of the mind, which a compelled communication forces the individual to reveal."); see also Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 42-43, 120 S.Ct. 2037 (citing Curcio v. United States, 354 U.S. 118, 128, 77 S.Ct. 1145, 1 L.Ed.2d 1225 (1957)) (holding that the act of producing documents in response to a subpoena was testimonial because the act required the accused to take "the mental and physical steps necessary to provide the prosecutor with an accurate inventory of the many sources of potentially incriminating evidence sought by the subpoena"); Doe II, 487 U.S. at 213, 108 S.Ct. 2341 (stating that the Fifth Amendment is intended "to spare the accused from having to reveal, directly or indirectly, his knowledge of facts relating him to the offense or from having to share his thoughts and beliefs with the Government").
Although the Supreme Court has not considered whether compelling a defendant to provide a fingerprint — or a password
Here, Diamond merely provided his fingerprint so that the police could use the physical characteristics of the fingerprint to unlock the cellphone. The compelled act did not require Diamond to "submit to testing in which an effort [was] made to determine his guilt or innocence on the basis of physiological responses, whether willed or not."
Like in Schmerber, Diamond's participation in providing his fingerprint to the government "was irrelevant" to whether Diamond's fingerprint actually unlocked the cellphone. See 384 U.S. at 765, 86 S.Ct. 1826 (concluding that the results of the blood sample depended on the chemical analysis of the blood, not the act of providing the blood sample). Whether Diamond's fingerprint actually unlocked the phone depended on whether the cellphone's fingerprint-scanner
Because the compelled act merely demonstrated Diamond's physical characteristics and did not communicate assertions of fact from Diamond's mind, we hold that Diamond's act of providing a fingerprint to the police to unlock a cellphone was not a testimonial communication protected by the Fifth Amendment.
For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the decision of the court of appeals.
Affirmed.