There are many different cell phone carriers, and each carrier would have to be contacted separately to ascertain if the phone was active at the time of the crash, which, by the way, was not determined definitively. Then the issue of obtaining the cooperation of each carrier without any kind of a search warrant.
Sorry, you are mistaken. The officer was NOT able to ascertain if a phone was in use at the time of the crash by typing a number into a computer. There is technology that can determine if a cell phone was in use at certain times, but it requires the actual phone being subject to a piece of hardware to extract that information, not the number typed into a cloud based service! There was a bill in New York legislature requiring cell phone owners to relinquish their phones to police to obtain this information with a warrant, but that bill raised serious 4th Amendment concerns.I don't know if it passed.
