
Cops
So the organisation who have been accused of killing him have tried to unlock his phone to "gather evidence". Isn't this the kind of thing that would cause a judge to throw it out of court?
Detectives from Largo, Florida, visited a funeral home in nearby Clearwater and tried, unsuccessfully, to unlock a phone with the hand of its deceased owner to aid an investigation. Thirty-year-old Linus Phillip was shot and killed by a Largo police officer in March. His fiancée, Victoria Armstrong, was at the funeral home …
Depending on the issue of "privacy of what", it may be true. Medical information, for example, ceases to be private, but attorney/client privilege (and I believe "confessional" privilege) survive (to the extent they survive while your alive, c.f. Mr. Cohen and the criminal enterprise exception).
However, this may fall foul of a different issue: who owns the body? If it is owned by the next-of-kin, this may violate the rights of them, in that this represents a search of their property...
>In English law bodies aren't property and can't be owned.
Depends on what you are trying to do with it...
Try to legally register someone's death, remove their body from a hospital mortuary and hold a funeral when you are neither the deceased's spouse or their executor and do not have the express permission of either of these individuals to perform any of the above...
No need for face-peeling, just acquire one finger and 'galvanize' it a little with some electromotive force. The finger will touch the screen of its own accord, satisfying even the most stringent liveness tests.
Oh wait, those muscles are back in the forearm. Hmmm, better take the whole arm...
"...bypassing the liveness checks of Face ID without requiring a creepy mask should not be beyond determined members of the authorities."
I would say that as walking & talking without dropping their doughnut and/or shooting someone appears to be beyond most 'members of the authorities' in the southern US, doing the necessary to enliven a corpse is very likely to be beyond them; regardless of how determined they may be.
If countries were serious they would legislate, especially the U.S., forcing mobile phone makers to provide a fail-safe way of accessing a mobile phone after the owner was deceased. Most likely by taking the device to the Mobile manufacturer and using a device specifically for that purpose, after death has been proved and a judgement or warrant is made.
number one on the list of things not to say in response to "Unlock your phone, ruffian", as it will presumably cause your subsequent demise to count as justified homicide on the part of the police.
("He was impeding our vital investigation into felonious mopery and fly-tipping. How else can we do our job?")
If an autopsy had been ordered of the body and it was still in the coroners lab for that purpose then I'd agree with what they did.
However from the article, either no autopsy had been undertaken or the body had been released to the family for burial. Therefore wouldn't they be potentially falling afoul of various "interfering with a body"-type laws? Many jurisdictions have laws about interfering with a body to blanketly cover - I presume - issues like grave robbing, necrophilia, stealing bodies for research/a lark, and so on.
Was it evidence of his guilt, so their shooting could be justified - killing someone for simply running should not be permissible since the cops were not "in fear for their lives" and they did have any evidence that he was an imminent danger to others should he flee. Or perhaps were they concerned is phone might have evidence of of THEIR guilt - maybe they were on the take from him and were trying to squeeze him for more and they wanted to make sure he hadn't recorded any previous meetings?
I think any cops going this far almost certainly have something to hide and should be investigated. This is not and should never be allowed to be normal police procedure! If the police won't return the phone to the widow, or if they do return it broken, that should be treated as probable cause for someone higher up than the Tampa police to get involved and start investigating these possibly crooked cops.