A district judge will allow investigators to search a cellphone belonging to Kristin Ramsey, who is charged in a long-unsolved West Des Moines murder, rejecting an unusual motion from her attorneys to quash the warrant or limit its breadth.
The April 2011 shooting death of Ashley Okland, a real estate agent whose body was found in a townhome she had been showing to customers, drew years of public scrutiny and hundreds of tips and investigative leads before police arrested Ramsey, 53, on March 17. At the time of the killing, Ramsey worked for the developer of the townhome project.
In the wake of her arrest, Ramsey’s attorneys filed a motion to block the state from executing a search warrant for information on her cellphone, allegedly including medical records and communications with her attorneys. On Wednesday, May 6, Judge Coleman McAllister rejected that request, allowing the state to pursue messages Ramsey allegedly sent and received in the 12 days before her arrest.
Warrant seeks 12 days of data before arrest
According to court filings, those 12 days cover the period between when Ramsey, who had been interviewed at other points in the investigation, was reinterviewed March 5 and when a grand jury indicted her for murder, resulting in her arrest.
Investigators with a search warrant seized Ramsey’s cellphone March 17 and the following day obtained a second warrant to search the contents of the phone. On March 19, her attorneys filed a “motion to quash the search warrant and for protective order” to prevent investigators from accessing what they said was legally protected information on her device.
The application for the phone search warrant remains sealed, but Ramsey’s attorneys have written in court filings that the warrant covers phone data from March 5 to 17. Among other things, they say, prosecutors want to see text messages between Ramsey and her husband. But they also accuse the state of wanting to see Ramsey’s emails with her lawyers and communications with her doctors, which are legally privileged.
Judge finds no evidence phone has sensitive info
In their response, prosecutors have said there is no precedent and no procedure allowing defendants to seek to quash a warrant. Any search warrant must be approved by a judge before its execution, and law enforcement officials have tools to avoid inappropriately accessing information, including using a “filter” or “taint” team of attorneys separate from the prosecution to review and weed out anything sensitive.
Should those measures fail, prosecutors say, defendants can move to suppress the offending evidence or otherwise prevent it from influencing their case. But no law or court rule allows defendants to block an already-approved search warrant in advance.
In his order, McAllister found that the court has the inherent right to impose a protective order limiting an already-approved warrant. But he refused to do so because Ramsey “had an opportunity but has not presented any affidavit, testimony, or evidentiary support for any conclusion that the cellphone contains privileged communications with any specificity.”
“The person who would know if there were any such communications and the nature of those communications … is the Defendant,” he wrote. “However, Defendant has not provided the Court with any particular or specific demonstration of facts to support the finding that a protective order should be issued by the Court.”
Ramsey is currently free on a $500,000 bond. Her trial is scheduled for January 2027.
William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com or 715-573-8166.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Judge in Ashley Okland case allows search of Kristin Ramsey’s phone
Reporting by William Morris, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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