After A Year, Nashville Police Return Jocques Clemmons' Phone

NASHVILLE, TN -- More than a year after it was seized, Metro Police agreed to return Jocques Clemmons' cell phone to his family Friday, according to a filing in federal court.

Clemmons' phone and social-media account information were taken as evidence Feb. 17, 2017, a week after Clemmons was shot three times and killed by MNPD officer Joshua Lippert at James Cayce Homes. In the search warrant application, Metro Police officer Danny Satterfield filed warrant applications seeking "any/all data contained and/or stored within" Clemmons’ Facebook account, Instagram account, and cellular telephone. including “pictures, videos, audio, text messages, incoming/outgoing Facebook Messanger [sic] conversations, voicemails, chat logs, contact information, call logs, emails, internet data, Wi-Fi data, IP address(es), search history, maps, locations, GPS data, drafts, deleted files/folders, etc."

Satterfield said the warrant was for an investigation into an alleged "aggravated assault" committed by Clemmons against Lippert prior to the shooting, though video showed that there was no physical altercation between the pair.

Clemmons' estate filed a federal lawsuit against Metro and the detective Feb. 9, claiming that the warrants were unconstitutional and unnecessary. Under federal rules of procedure, the return of property seized via an unlawful warrant can be sought via a motion.

“Mr. Clemmons’ Facebook and Instagram accounts had no conceivable bearing on the supposed crime that the MNPD claimed to be investigating, and Officer Satterfield’s comically unconstitutional warrant applications did not even bother to pretend that they did,” Nashville attorney Daniel Horwitz, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Clemmons’ estate, said at the time. “Further, at the time that Officer Satterfield applied for the search warrants at issue, there was literally nobody on earth who was less likely to be arrested than Mr. Clemmons, who had been deceased for nearly a week. These search warrants could not have been any less valid if they were written in crayon.”

On Friday, the estate and police came to an agreement, by which his phone will be returned to the family and the social-media records will be destroyed and expunged.

“While we remain disappointed that these three wildly overbroad and comically unconstitutional search warrants were sought or granted in the first place, we appreciate that the MNPD has now agreed to take the steps necessary to remedy those prior illegalities," Horwitz told Patch Friday. "The Clemmons family is very happy to have his phone back—which contains several cherished family photos—and it is satisfied that the MNPD has agreed to destroy the data that it unlawfully obtained from Mr. Clemmons’ social media accounts following his death.”

Nashville district attorney Glenn Funk chose not to charge Lippert, who remains on administrative assignment with MNPD, in Clemmons' death.