1. The Court has held previously that a search incident to arrest may include the defendant’s wallet/purse. Is there really a difference between a wallet and a cell phone? What if Riley’s wallet had contained incriminating photographs of him? Would the police be required to get a warrant?
2. Why does the Court point out that the warrant requirement is “not merely an inconvenience to be somehow ‘weighed’ against the claims of police efficiency”? How is that related to Riley’s circumstances?
3. In what way does this case illustrate the clash between technology and case precedent? What role does stare decisis (“let the decision stand”) play in this case?
Riley was the driver of a car stopped by a San Diego, California, police officer for a traffic violation that eventually led to his arrest for concealed possession of two loaded handguns found under the seat of his car. Riley was arrested and transported to a booking facility where police retrieved Riley’s cell phone from his pocket. At the police station about two hours after the arrest, a detective specializing in criminal gangs examined the contents of Riley’s cell phone. The detective found videos and photographs that connected Riley with a gang-related shooting that had occurred a few weeks earlier. Based partially on the evidence from Riley’s cell phone, the state charged him with attempted murder. The prosecutor also sought an enhanced sentence based upon Riley’s membership in a criminal street gang. Riley moved to suppress all evidence that the police had obtained from his cell phone, claiming a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Prosecutors argued that the search of the cell phone was proper because it was incident to a lawful arrest within the guidelines of previous case law. The government argued that the cell phone search was similar to any other method used by individuals to store information (e.g., a wallet) and that cell phones fell into that same category. The trial court denied Riley’s motion to sup-press the evidence based on the Fourth Amendment and Riley was convicted at trial. The state appellate court affirmed Riley’s conviction and Riley appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the evidence obtained from his cell phone was a warrantless search that did not fall into any category of exception.
In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decisions of the lower courts and ruled in favor of Riley. The Court held that the digital era required a rule that individuals have a high level of expectation of privacy in their cell phones because they are capable of storing and accessing a quantity of information, some highly personal, that no person would ever have had on his person in hard-copy form. The Court also reasoned that the search incident to arrest exception to the warrant requirement had two primary purposes: officer safety and prevention of the destruction of evidence. In this case, the search of a cell phone incident to arrest could not be justified on those grounds. As a result, the Court would not extend the warrantless search exception to include cell phones confiscated from an arrested defendant.
“Digital data stored on a cell phone can not itself be used as a weapon to harm an arresting officer or to effectuate the arrestee’s escape. Law enforcement officers remain free to examine the physical aspects of a phone to ensure that it will not be used as a weapon—say, to determine whether there is a razor blade hidden between the phone and its case. Once an officer has secured a phone and eliminated any potential physical threats, however, data on the phone can endanger no one.”
“Our holding, of course, is not that the information on a cell phone is immune from search; it is instead that a warrant is generally required before such a search, even when a cell phone is seized incident to arrest. Our cases have historically recognized that the warrant requirement is an important working part of our machinery of government, not merely an inconvenience to be somehow ‘weighed’ against the claims of police efficiency . . . “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. Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant.”
