Supreme Court Hears Case on 4th Amendment, Warrantless Search of a Smartphone
The Supreme Court examined how much information police can extract from a smartphone without obtaining a warrant in a case argued Tuesday, Riley v. California. Justices peppered both sides with questions, but appeared to be wary of giving police access to all cellphone information without a warrant. “People carry their entire lives on their cellphones,” Justice Elena Kagan said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
David Riley, then a college student, was stopped by police near San Diego because the tags on his Lexus had expired. Police soon found that Riley’s license was expired and when they searched his vehicle they discovered two firearms under the hood. When a police officer searched Riley’s phone, he noticed several references to CK, a common abbreviation for Crip Killers, a slang term for members of the gang Bloods.
The phone also contained a photo of Riley standing in front of a red Oldsmobile, a second vehicle he owned. Starting with the information on the smartphone, police eventually tied Riley to an earlier incident in which three individuals had allegedly fired several shots at a passing car before fleeing in a red Oldsmobile. Riley was tried twice on charges of shooting at an occupied vehicle, attempted murder, and assault with a semiautomatic firearm. The first trial resulted in a hung jury. He was eventually convicted of all three charges, based largely on circumstantial evidence, much of which was found on his phone, according to arguments his attorneys filed with the Supreme Court (http://bit.ly/POIttk). With a “gang enhancement,” he was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. The U.S. Justice Department filed in support of the state.
"It has always been the case that an occasion of an arrest did not give the police officers authority to search through the private papers and the drawers and bureaus and cabinets of somebody’s house, and that protection should not evaporate more than 200 years after the founding because we have the technological development of smartphones that have resulted in people carrying that information in their pockets,” Riley’s attorney Jeffrey Fisher told the court.
Justice Samuel Alito said smartphones present “difficult problems” for courts to sort through. But Alito presented another hypothetical. What about photos in the billfold of someone arrested by police? he asked. “Do you dispute the proposition that the police could examine the photos in his billfold and use that as evidence against him?” Alito asked how those photos are any different from information stored on a smartphone.
Digital information is different, Fisher replied. “Physical items at the scene can pose a safety threat and have destruction possibilities that aren’t present with digital evidence,” he said.
Justice Anthony Kennedy asked a similar question, sticking with Alito’s hypothetical. What if police find a business card in the wallet? he asked. “Can they turn the card over and read it? They're not looking for a pin or an explosive. They're trying to read what’s on the card. Can they do that?"
How broad should protections be? Chief Justice John Roberts asked. Are protections different for information found on a Facebook or Twitter account? Roberts asked. Is information on Facebook different? “The point is you want these things [on Facebook] to be public and seen widely,” he said. What if the phone rings? Can police answer it if they don’t have a warrant? Roberts asked.
"We're not saying [police] can’t look at digital information,” Fisher said. “We're just saying that when they seize it, they can freeze the contents and then go get a warrant and search what they're allowed to search and keep it under the rules of that warrant.”
"If Mr. Riley had been carrying physical photographs in his pocket at the time of his arrest, there’s no dispute that arresting officers could have looked at those photographs to see whether they contained evidence of crime,” said California Solicitor General Edward Dumont, who argued the case on behalf of the state. “What would have been reasonable in that situation does not become constitutionally unreasonable simply because Mr. Riley instead carried his photographs in digital form on a smartphone.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Dumont the court needs to establish a rule for Riley and similar cases. If police arrest someone for driving without a seat belt “it seems absurd that they should be able to search that person’s iPhone,” said Justice Antonin Scalia.