Supreme Court says, "'No, You CANNOT Hear Me Now!' Let Alone Search my Cellphone Unless you get a Warrant" in RILEY v. CALIFORNIA

An unanimous U.S. Supreme Court determined that police officers must get a warrant to search a suspect's cellphone, absent an exigent circumstance.  The Court, taking Riley v. Cal  and U.S. v. Wurie together, found that officers searches of suspects' respective cellphones, without a warrant violated the suspects' Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights against "unreasonable searches and seizures."

I know what most regulars to OP-IP are thinking; what does this have to do with intellectual property law and technology and more importantly, what this guy know about criminal law and/or constitutional law?  Although I may not be a criminal defense attorney or prosecutor, and I did not even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, I did take Criminal Procedure with Susan W. Brenner and Constitution Law with the legendary Allen Sultan (the virtual Forrest Gump of law professors) at the University of Dayton School of Law.  And, I interned at the City of Dayton Prosecutor's Office the summer after my first year of law school.  Clearly, I am eminently qualified to speak on this topic.  More importantly, based on my association with the International Technology Law Association (ITechLaw), I was asked by the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) (also known as the Black Press of America) to opine on these Supreme Court decisions for one of its upcoming articles.  Accordingly, since I was already familiar with these cases, I decided to write about them here.


So, why did the U.S. Supreme Court determine that officers must first secure a search warrant before looking through a suspect's cellphone?  The Court first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment gives us the right against unreasonable searches and seizures and emphasized that the "ultimate touchstone" of the Fourth Amendment is "reasonableness" of the search.  Then, the Court looked to what was being searched, namely modern cellphones, including smart phones, such as an Apple iPhone 5S (shown above).  The Court found that the pervasiveness of cellphone use, their immense computing power and voluminous amounts of data (including personal information) that is stored in their 16 gig up to 64 gig all weigh against the reasonableness in allowing searches without a warrant.  Further, the Court recognized that many smart phones are linked to cloud storage services meaning that a search may include even more information.  Taken as a whole, the Court found the warrantless search to be unreasonable.

The Court dismissed the government's position for why it should not need to seek a warrant first, namely that evidence on the smart phone could be permanently lost if the smart phone's data could be remotely wiped or the locked-down.  The Court address these concerns by saying that a smart phone could be preserved from remote wiping by turning the phone off or using technology to block remote wiping and lock-down wireless signals.

Finally, the Court said that if there is a real concern that evidence might be lost, a warrantless search would be permitted under one of the exigent circumstance exceptions.

© Stephen J. Weyer 2014

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