May, J.
Emery Brown appeals following a judgment ordering the forfeiture of $32,284.00 in cash seized by the Fortville Police Department (“FPD”) during a traffic stop of Brown’s vehicle. Eaton, in his capacity as the Hancock County Prosecutor (“State”), cross-appeals. Brown raises two issues: (1) whether the trial court abused its discretion in admitting Brown’s pre-Miranda statements to the police; and (2) whether sufficient evidence supported the trial court’s forfeiture order. On cross-appeal, the State raises a third issue: (3) whether the trial court properly excluded evidence obtained from Brown’s cell phone.
We reverse and remand.
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…[W]e hold the State failed to put forth sufficient evidence to sustain the forfeiture order because it did not establish a nexus between the currency and illegal activity. See Gonzalez, 74 N.E.3d at 1232 (holding evidence was insufficient to prove nexus between $810 and possession of marijuana).
Notwithstanding our previous holdings, we must address the State’s issue on cross-appeal regarding exclusion of the cell phone data from evidence to determine whether remand for a second forfeiture evidentiary hearing is necessary. The State argues that the trial court erred in excluding the cell phone data because the court misinterpreted Indiana Code section 35-33-5-7(b)’s requirement that a search warrant be executed within ten days after being issued. Thus, the State’s argument requires us to analyze Indiana Code section 35-33-5-7.
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Effective July 1, 2020, the legislature amended Indiana Code section 35-33-5-7 to read, in relevant part: (b) Except as provided in subsection (f), a search warrant must be: (1) executed not more than ten (10) days after the date of issuance; and (2) returned to the court without unnecessary delay after the execution.
(f) Notwithstanding section 4 of this chapter, a warrant authorizing a search, testing, or other analysis of an item, tangible or intangible, is deemed executed when the item is seized by a law enforcement officer. A return of a warrant authorizing a search, testing, or other analysis of an item is sufficient if the return contains a statement indicating the item was seized by a law enforcement officer.
Ind. Code § 35-33-5-7 (2020). The State asserts that the amendment to include subsection (f) was a remedial measure intended to clarify the meaning of “executed” in the statute, and therefore, we should apply subsection (f) retroactively. See N.G. v. State, 148 N.E.3d 971, 975 (Ind. 2020) (holding amendment to statute clarifying when an offender’s waiting period began prior to seeking expungement was remedial and applied retroactively). Brown, on the other hand, argues the plain language of the statute required the officers to complete their search of the cell phone within ten days after the warrant was issued, and officers waited beyond that timeframe to extract data from the phone. He maintains the 2020 amendment that added subsection (f) constituted a change in the law, which cannot be applied retroactively. See Johnson v. State, 36 N.E.3d 1130, 1137 (Ind. Ct. App. 2015) (holding amendment to statute regarding trial court’s authority to modify a defendant’s sentence constituted a substantive change in the law and could not be applied retroactively), trans. denied…The addition of subsection (f) appears calculated to cure an ambiguity and clarify the original intent of the forfeiture statute. If we apply the trial court’s interpretation of the “executed” language in the 2011 statute by analogy to a situation in which police secure a warrant to search an office building and seize thousands of pages of business records, then the officers would have to continuously reapply for search warrants until they finished reviewing all the documents. This would be an absurd result. See ESPN, Inc. v. Univ. of Notre Dame Police Dep’t, 62 N.E.3d 1192, 1199-1200 (Ind. 2016) (declining to hold a private university’s police department was a “public agency” for purposes of Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act because doing so would lead to absurd results).
We also find out-of-state authority from Idaho persuasive. An Idaho statute and an Idaho rule of criminal procedure imposed a requirement that police officers execute a search warrant within fourteen days after a magistrate issues the warrant. Wolf v. State, 266 P.3d 1169, 1174 (Idaho Ct. App. 2011). Officers seized the defendant’s computer soon after the magistrate issued the warrant, but the officers took over fourteen days to extract data from the computer. Id. at 1175. In a petition for postconviction relief, the Court of Appeals of Idaho held that a motion to suppress the extracted data would not have been successful. Id. Although a forensic report indicated that a search of the defendant’s computer was not completed until months after it was seized, the court held that probable cause to search the hard drive did not dissipate while the computer sat in the police evidence locker. Id. Like in Wolf, whatever evidence of criminal activity existed on Brown’s phone at the time officers seized the phone was still present when the officers extracted the data from the phone because Brown did not have access to the phone while it was in police custody and there is no indication the data in the phone changed after it was seized.
For the reasons stated above, we conclude amendment of the statute to include subsection (f) was a remedial measure intended to clarify that a search warrant is considered “executed” for purposes of Indiana Code section 35-33-5-7 when officers seize the items described in the search warrant. We will “construe a remedial statute in a way that effectuates the evident purpose for which it was enacted. And when that purpose is served by retroactivity, strong and compelling reasons exist.” N.G., 148 N.E.3d at 974 (internal citation and quotation marks omitted). Here, retroactivity serves the purpose of efficiency because it eliminates the need for law enforcement to continue reapplying for search warrants while analyzing large troves of evidence. Officers also cannot always anticipate the difficulty involved in de-encrypting an electronic device until after the device is seized. Subsection (f) ensures officers they only need to secure one search warrant for seizing the electronic device. Therefore, we hold the trial court erred in excluding the cell phone data at trial on the basis that officers did not timely execute the search warrant.
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The State failed to put forth sufficient evidence at trial to establish a nexus between the cash confiscated from Brown and a drug dealing operation, and thus, we reverse the trial court’s judgment in favor of the State. However, we remand the matter for a new evidentiary hearing because the trial court erroneously excluded the data retrieved from Brown’s cell phone on the basis that officers did not timely execute the search warrant. During that new hearing, the trial court should exclude Brown’s pre-Miranda statements from evidence.
Reversed and remanded.
Robb, J., and Vaidik, J., concur.