@meghannmcuniff: A Hawaii judge said Monday that police complied with their search warrant terms when they used hidden metadata to locate a receipt for a recording device in a man's email. Lawyers for Gerhardt Konig wanted Judge Paul B.K. Wong to prohibit prosecutors from using the information as evidence in their attempted murder case because they said it violated the "spirit" of the search warrant. The warrant authorized a specific list of keyword terms, including separate and divorce, for an investigation into Konig's alleged attempted murder of his wife, Arielle Konig, on the Pali Puka Trail in O'ahu on March 24, 2025. The word separate appeared in the metadata of a Walmart receipt in Konig's email for an 800-hour a Knight64GB hidden voice recorder. In a hearing on Monday (March 30), Konig's lawyer Manta Dircks said allowing Detective Thomas Iinuma of the Honolulu Police Department to testify about the receipt creates "a dangerous world moving forward for search warrants and digital forensics." Dircks said an investigator "with any knowledge of coding" could select keywords that "opens the door to all emails containing that source code, whether or not it's relevant in the actual body of the email to the case. So it's very scary precedent." Judge Wong said investigators located the email by lawfully using the keyword separate. "These parameters in this search warrant in this case prevented law enforcement from conducting a discretionary and indiscriminate search of the defendant's laptop. The Constitution does not prohibit all searches, but only unreasonable searches," said Wong, who presided in Hawaii's 1st Circuit Court in Honolulu. You can watch the entire discussion and hear the judge's full reasoning on my YouTube channel. #law #crime #police #judge

Meghann Cuniff

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Tuesday 31 March 2026 21:41:14 GMT