Source: http://voiceforthedefenseonline.com/story/federal-corner-please-read-riley-v-california%E2%80%94it%E2%80%99s-big-case-f-r-buck-files-jr
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 10:48:58+00:00

Document:
On June 26, 2014, the headline in The New York Times read, “Justices, 9–0, Rule Cellphone Search Needs a Warrant.” The day before, the Supreme Court had announced its decision in Riley v. California, ___S.Ct.___, WL 2864483 (2014), holding that police generally may not, without a warrant, search digital information on a cell phone seized from an individual who has been arrested. Chief Justice Roberts authored the opinion of the Court. All of the other Justices except for Justice Alito joined in the opinion. Justice Alito wrote an opinion concurring, in part, and concurring in the judgment. Few would have predicted that there would have been no dissents.
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.” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 481, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971). Recent technological advances similar to those discussed here have, in addition, made the process of obtaining a warrant itself more efficient. See McNeely, 569 U.S., at ___, 133 S.Ct., at 1561–1563; id., at ___, 133 S.Ct., at 1573 (Roberts, C. J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (describing jurisdiction where “police officers can e-mail warrant requests to judges’ iPads [and] judges have signed such warrants and e-mailed them back to officers in less than 15 minutes”) [emphasis added].
In light of the availability of the exigent circumstances exception, there is no reason to believe that law enforcement officers will not be able to address some of the more extreme hypotheticals that have been suggested: a suspect texting an accomplice who, it is feared, is preparing to detonate a bomb, or a child abductor who may have information about the child’s location on his cell phone. The defendants here recognize—indeed, they stress—that such fact-specific threats may justify a warrantless search of cell phone data. See Reply Brief in No. 13–132, at 8–9; Brief for Respondent in No. 13–212, at 30, 41. The critical point is that, unlike the search incident to arrest exception, the exigent circumstances exception requires a court to examine whether an emergency justified a warrantless search in each particular case. See McNeely, supra, at ___, 133 S.Ct., at 1559 [emphasis added].
For those who have not read the Court’s opinion, certiorari had been granted by the Court in two cases that were consolidated for argument: Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie.
search /s “cell phone” /s incident /s arrest—in the allfeds database, there were 184 cases; in the allstates database, there were 132 cases.
search /s “cell phone”—in the allfeds database, there were 1,688 cases; in the allstates database, there were 1,513 cases.
These cases require us to decide how the search incident to ar­rest doctrine applies to modern cell phones, which are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy. A smart phone of the sort taken from Riley was unheard of ten years ago; a significant majority of American adults now own such phones. See A. Smith, Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013). Even less sophisticated phones like Wurie’s, which have already faded in popularity since Wurie was arrested in 2007, have been around for less than 15 years. Both phones are based on technology nearly inconceivable just a few decades ago, when Chimel and Robinson were decided.
Prior to the digital age, people did not typically carry a cache of sensitive personal information with them as they went about their day. Now it is the person who is not carrying a cell phone, with all that it contains, who is the exception. According to one poll, nearly three-quarters of smart phone users report being within five feet of their phones most of the time, with 12% admitting that they even use their phones in the shower.
Today, by contrast, it is no exaggeration to say that many of the more than 90% of American adults who own a cell phone keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives—from the mundane to the intimate.
The two cases before us concern the reasonableness of a warrantless search incident to a lawful arrest. In 1914, this Court first acknowledged in dictum “the right on the part of the Government, always recognized under English and American law, to search the person of the accused when legally arrested to discover and seize the fruits or evidences of crime.” Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 392, 34 S.Ct. 341, 58 L.Ed. 652. Since that time, it has been well accepted that such a search constitutes an exception to the warrant requirement. Indeed, the label “exception” is something of a misnomer in this context, as warrantless searches incident to arrest occur with far greater frequency than searches conducted pursuant to a warrant. See 3 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 5.2(b), p. 132, and n. 15 (5th ed. 2012).
The United States asserts that a search of all data stored on a cell phone is “materially indistinguishable” from searches of these sorts of physical items. Brief for United States in No. 13–212, p. 26. That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together. Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse. A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee’s pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but any extension of that reasoning to digital data has to rest on its own bottom [emphasis added].
In 1926, Learned Hand observed (in an opinion later quoted in Chimel ) that it is “a totally different thing to search a man’s pockets and use against him what they contain, from ransacking his house for everything which may incriminate him.” United States v. Kirschenblatt, 16 F.2d 202, 203 (C.A.2). If his pockets contain a cell phone, however, that is no longer true. Indeed, a cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form—unless the phone is.
Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation’s response to the reviled “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write that “[e]very man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.” 10 Works of John Adams 247–248 (C. Adams ed. 1856). According to Adams, Otis’ speech was “the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.” Id., at 248 (quoted in Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 625, 6 S.Ct. 524, 29 L.Ed. 746 (1886)).
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,” Boyd, supra, at 630, 6 S.Ct. 524. 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.
Judge Roberts examined the facts in Riley and Wurie in the light of Chimel v. California, 89 S.Ct. 2034 (1969); Robinson; United States v. Robinson, 94 S.Ct. 467 (1973); and Arizona v. Gant, 129 S.Ct. 1710 (2009), and declined to extend Robinson to searches of data on cell phones, and held instead that officers must generally secure a warrant before conducting such a search.
THIS CASE IS TOO IMPORTANT FOR ME TO TRY TO SUMMARIZE ANY MORE THAN I HAVE ALREADY DONE. THIS IS ONE CASE THAT EVERY LAWYER WHO PRACTICES STATE OR FEDERAL CRIMINAL LAW MUST READ IN ITS ENTIRETY.
On July 2, 2014, there appeared in The New York Times an article by Adam Liptak entitled, “Compromise at the Court Veils Its Rifts.” In the article, we find these two sentences: “While the Court’s level of agreement this term was authentically high, the numbers overstate the case.” “A lot of unanimity is ersatz,” said David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
First, I am not convinced at this time that the ancient rule on searches incident to arrest is based exclusively (or even primarily) on the need to protect the safety of arresting officers and the need to prevent the destruction of evidence. . . . This rule antedates the adoption of the Fourth Amendment by at least a century.
This brings me to my second point. While I agree with the holding of the Court, I would reconsider the question presented here if either Congress or state legislatures, after assessing the legitimate needs of law enforcement and the privacy interests of cell phone owners, enact legislation that draws reasonable distinctions based on categories of information or perhaps other variables [emphasis added].
I really enjoy reading the opinions written by Chief Justice Roberts. Even when I disagree with his holding or his logic, I am impressed by the quality of his writing. In Riley, he goes from the visitor from Mars to Learned Hand to James Otis and John Adams—and it all makes sense.
So what’s next? The search cases based on exigent circumstances will probably be next on the horizon. We can only wait and see what law enforcement officers will say in support of their decisions to do searches without warrants because of exigent circumstances. These should keep us busy for a long, long time.
So what else should we be concerned about because of Riley? How about ipads and other tablets? It seems to me that the same rules should apply for them as for cell phones. Once again, we can wait and see.

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