In Oregon, it is legal to break into a car to get a child or domestic animal out in hot weather. Suppose I see a child left in a hot car. I don't know how to break in, so I Google "how to break into a car."
A few months later, the police in another town search my phone for an unrelated reason. They see that I Googled how to break into a car. Could there be any legal consequences for me?
The Google search is not itself a crime or any other kind of offense.
It could be used as circumstantial evidence that you did something intentionally or with pre-mediation, rather than accidentally, or not at all.
If you can provide an alternative explanation for the search that is plausible, such as the one in the question, and there isn't a close proximity of time, a jury is unlikely to give the search much weight as circumstantial evidence. But ultimately, the weight to give any piece of evidence is for the jury to decide in the context of all of the evidence in the case combined.
A lot of things are crimes if done. However, people often look for information about such things to either understand how not to commit the crime (e.g. googling speed limits), understand what happened (How did ENRON work?), or just plainly, because they write a story and thus need to know the law - or how it was violated. Or just because they are goofballs and want to know about a certain person, case, or method of death. None of this is illegal, as long as you don't act on it.
There have been cases, where evidence of a web search was used as circumstantial evidence in addition to other pieces. If you are familiar with Forensic Files, you'll know that in many of the older episodes this pattern appears, and in newer episodes reconstruction of the search history sometimes plays a place.
For example, Season 11, Episode 17, depicts the murder of Sherry Durall. One of the forensics team says about her husband Robert Durall:
Bob's internet search engine revealed he looked for information on all sorts of diabolical schemes. We were shocked to see these searches on things like "poison herbs", "death something", about sedation of people, also about smothering but the most graphic one was actually a search that Durall did on the words "kill spouse".
Robert Durall did appeal his conviction in or before 2003. In the brief the case history and legal history are depicted. In part, I want to point out, that no small part of the discussion is dedicated to the fact, that they used his internet searches as circumstantial evidence, to establish his mens rea and justify first-degree murder.
In its conclusion that "Durall's mental state, including his research and planning of his wife's death, which preceded the murder for months, was qualitatively and quantitatively much more egregious and culpable than that required to prove meditated intent,” the trial court relied upon the following facts: on several occasions during the months be- fore Carolyn's murder, Durall conducted internet research on how to kill his wife;! Durall stated in e-mails to women he met on an internet dating service that he dreaded the prospect of a divorce and he had "a plan" to resolve his unsatisfactory marriage: Durall met with one woman six months before Carolyn's murder and told her that it would be easier if his wife were dead; and Durall made a list of tasks and items needed for the crime. In addition, Durall took elaborate steps to cover up the crime, including hiring a private investigator, cleaning and concealing blood stains from the murder, disposing of his wife's body in a rural area, suggesting to police, friends, Carolyn's co-workers, and family that Carolyn had run off with another man, and concocting an alibi to comport to these facts.
Durall conducted searches using the following terms: “murder;" "kill spouse;" "accidental death;" "smothering:" "+poison —herbs;" "+poison t+herbs —death;" and "sleep +pills +death."
As seen in Wood, the degree of Durall's planning and research distinguishes this case apart from more typical mur- der cases. Moreover, while the defendant in Wood used third parties to explore means of killing her husband, Durall's use of the internet to do the same suggests a similarly culpable mental state.
Qualitatively, Durall's actions are similar to those seen in State v. Vaughn, 83 Wn. App. 669, 924 P.2d 27 (1996), a case cited by both parties.
While the search can be evidence, it also requires other evidence to make a conviction. If there is a different explanation or even evidence that the searching person wasn't even there, that evidence has to be taken into account too.
the police in another town search my phone for an unrelated reason. They see that I Googled how to break into a car. Could there be any legal consequences for me?
If you're breaking into a car to rescue a child, you're presumably not then leaving them on the side of the road and throwing yourself a hero's parade.
You should be calling the police and documenting what you observed and what you did to resolve the situation-- and handing the child off to responding officers/CPS. This way the perpetrator is held accountable, you clear yourself of suspicion, and the victim is actually secured.
Were any questions to later arise about the nature of your search query, you now have a plausible, defensible, and verifiable reason for having done so.
You need to do this anyway so EMTs can evaluate victim for conditions like heatstroke-- and to cover your own ass against the inevitable counter-claim that you were attempting grand theft auto and kidnapping. This assumes you were not murdered on the spot by the perpetrator in defense of his property.
If you're going to play lawman, then at least act like one and call for backup before intervening. Everything has consequences!
I am a translator and I google such things a lot, when I work on a movie or a TV Series. Imagine you have to translate Breaking Bad series: you will google meth cooking a lot in order to find language-specific terms and slang words. Never had any pbm with that.
If you do it at work, and your employer notices, they might call the cops on you. It happened after the Boston marathon bombing, when six members of a joint anti-terrorism force came to a man's house and interrogated him because he made a Google search about pressure cookers and his employer got concerned: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/312599/
Here's an attempt at using a particular song download as evidence in a murder trial: https://www.news4jax.com/news/2006/06/14/used-to-love-her-download-played-for-jury-in-husbands-murder-trial-2/
