A Texas statute requires “the state” to turn over certain information to criminal defendants as part of discovery. In 2024, in a case called State v. Heath, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals interpreted the term “state” broadly to mean the entire state of Texas, including prosectors and law enforcement. Now, just two years after Heath, the State Prosecuting Attorney is asking the Court to revisit its decision and adopt a narrower interpretation of “the state”—one that would limit prosecutors’ statutory disclosure obligations. The outcome of this case, which centers on whether a recorded jail call should have been disclosed, has significant implications for the rights of criminal defendants throughout Texas to discover evidence relevant to their cases.

This case concerns the constitutionality of a highly intrusive law enforcement practice: the use of geofence warrants. Geofence warrants compel tech companies like Google to provide to law enforcement location data from every cell phone likely to have been within a certain area during a given time window. Then, law enforcement officers decide for themselves which users to focus on, and demand additional location information—and eventually identifying information—for the users they select. Geofence warrants raise grave constitutional concerns, including that (1) they authorize dragnet searches that sweep up the private data of many people without probable cause to believe that all or any of them were involved in any crime, and (2) they allow law enforcement officers to decide which users to focus on for additional data collection without judicial oversight. This case therefore has significant implications for Texans’ ability to secure their digital privacy and property against unjustified government intrusion.