BACKGROUND

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution requires that the police obtain a search warrant before searching a person’s property. Property can mean a home, car, computer, or a phone.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to permit the warrantless search of the person of an arrestee (the area within the arrestee’s control) as an incident to the arrest; the Courts’ interpretation is based on the idea that such a search is not unreasonable. A search incident to arrest may only be conducted when there is a lawful custodial arrest. In other words, there is probable cause that the arrestee committed a crime and an arrest is actually made. A search of an arrestee is undertaken to prevent destruction of evidence and to prevent access to a weapon.

Additionally, the search must be contemporaneous with the arrest.  

Generally, if the Fourth Amendment is violated, one may move to suppress evidence and file for civil damages against government agents. 

CASE: Riley v. California

David Leon Riley was halted during a traffic stop and loaded weapons were found in his car. The arresting officer used Mr. Riley’s phone and noticed a term associated with a street gang. The phone was taken to the police station and further examined; there, the police found photographic evidence and the State charged Riley in connection with a shooting and sough a further sentence.  Riley moved to suppress all evidence that the police had obtained from his cell phone. The trial court denied the motion, and Riley was convicted by a jury. The California Court of Appeals affirmed the decision.After another appeal, the case made its way to the Supreme Court. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-132

The supreme Court simultaneously heard  United States v. Wurie and Riley v. California but we will explore the result and Riley v. California. The Court held that under the Fourth Amendment “a warrant is generally required for such a search, even when a cell phone is seized incident to arrest.” The Court also held that information accessible via the phone but stored using “cloud computing” is not even “on the arrestee’s person.” 

The majority found that digital contents of a smartphone do not threaten the safety of police officers, and that searches for which officers only have a belief that they may find evidence of a crime still violate constitutional rights. Justice Roberts said the following

“Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life”. The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought”

However, this does not mean that the police must necessarily let evidence on a phone escape until they get a warrant; officers may prevent data tampering without looking through the phone for information such as photographs by taking reasonable steps until a warrant is obtained. The Court mentions ways the police can preserve evidence until they get a warrant.

For instance, worries of remote wiping can be fully prevented by disconnecting a phone from the network by turning off the phone or removing its battery. If they are concerned about encryption in addition to a remote wipe, officers can leave a phone powered on and place it in a Faraday bag,  a bag made of aluminum foil, to protect the phone from radio waves. 

If officers happen to seize a phone in an unlocked state, they may be able to disable a phone’s automatic-lock feature in order to prevent the phone from locking and possibly encrypting data.

Furthermore, the Court held that some warrantless searches of cell phones might be permitted in an emergency: when the government’s interests are so compelling that the search would be considered reasonable.

So what happened to Riley after the Supreme Court decision? 

The Supreme Court  sent the case back to a lower court, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal, to decide how its ruling would affect his case.

The 4th District court found that while the phone’s photographs were improperly seized and admitted as evidence, the error was not important enough  to have affected the final verdict and there would be no retrial.