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The first mistake was committing the crimes in the first place. The second mistake was using electronic communications to discuss their crimes. Committing them in a jurisdiction where the jury might not be as sympathetic as it could be is pretty far down the list.
Seems to me that apart from shooting the cop, they weren't committing any crimes that haven't successfully been committed all over the country for years by their fellow travelers. Seems that shooting a cop is the threshold for getting the book thrown at you, and as long as you don't do that you can just keep doing low level terrorism forever.
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Zoomer criminals just leave the damn phone at home challenge [IMPOSSIBLE!!!].
Leaving your phone at home can also be presented as evidence of intent to commit a crime, especially if your usual pattern is to carry it with you everywhere. This has been successfully presented as circumstantial evidence by prosecutors at trial in various cases.
I think the argument is intended to be that since you carry your phone everywhere and the phone was at home, you must have been too.
If the intent is to use the phone as an alibi based on location data, the issue is that modern phones track a lot more than just rough location. Eg. unlock/lock events, movement, checking notifications, etc. For a habitual phone user, a gap of a few hours with absolutely no activity in the middle of the day looks pretty odd. Especially when a digital forensics expert could compare it to the pattern of life for the last six months or something.
And if they get any indication that the suspect left their house (eg. vehicle GPS, red light camera, neighbor's Ring camera) now they are caught lying, plus leaving the phone at home looks like preparation for an illegal act.
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@urquan
Yeah, the unstated premise there was "assuming you don't get caught". If you get busted in flagrante delicto then I can see how that would make things worse. But if you even hoped to get away with it, not having the tracking device in your pocket with a time-stamped trail is a good idea.
I think it's possible that even if they left phones at home, the police were able to obtain them by getting search warrants for their homes after arresting them. From there, if the phones were already on, and using biometrics for unlocking, the police don't even need sophisticated methods to access the messaging apps on them.
One of the lessons has to be to turn off the face/fingerprint unlocks on the phone you use to plan terrorism.
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