Source: http://gaprivacytech.org/journal/tag/Mobile
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 00:16:04+00:00

Document:
By Timothy H. Lee[1. Timothy Lee is a law clerk for the Honorable Lisa Godbey Wood, Chief Judge, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, and following which he will next serve as law clerk with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.] In 2001, the United States Supreme Court declared that evolving technology must not “erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.”[2. Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34 (2001).] Since then, however, courts have struggled to apply the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment to new forms of communication and information storage. But as technology – and with it, society’s expectations of privacy – continues to evolve, the question of how to balance the needs of law enforcement against the requirements of the Fourth Amendment has taken on increasing importance. The Georgia Court of Appeals recently made a crucial contribution to this expanding area of law when it decided Hawkins v. State[3. Hawkins v. State, No. A10A1575, 2010 WL 4883650 (Ga. Ct. App. Dec. 1, 2010).] – a landmark case of first impression that sat squarely at the intersection of two challenging areas of jurisprudence: the unsettled doctrine of searches of automobiles incident to arrest after Arizona v. Gant and the emerging law surrounding the constitutionality of cell phone searches.
In April of 2009, the Supreme Court issued a decision – Arizona v. Gant – that substantially altered the search-incident-to-arrest analysis. In Gant, officers arrested and handcuffed a driver who was driving on a suspended license before placing him in the back of their squad car.[12. Arizona v. Gant, 129 S. Ct. 1710, 1714 (2009).] The officers then conducted a search of the vehicle, where they discovered cocaine.[13. Id.] The Court, without explicitly overruling Belton, announced a substantially different and more nuanced approach to searches of vehicles, replacing Belton’s bright-line rule that officers could search cars whenever they arrested an occupant of the vehicle. The Court explained that there were only two situations in which a search of an automobile incident to arrest could take place. First, affirming Chimel, the Court held that a search of the passenger compartment of a car is permissible if the arrestee is “unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search.”[14. Id. at 1719.] Second, the Court held that if the officers may search passenger compartments and any containers found therein if have a reasonable belief that they will find evidence of the crime of arrest, even where the arrestee is not within reaching distance of the car.[15. Id.] Arizona v. Gant, by permitting searches of cars incident to arrest in only two situations, effectively overruled Belton and changed the way courts evaluate the constitutionality of warrantless searches of vehicles incident to arrest and the containers therein.
The Georgia Court of Appeals thus decided Hawkins against a backdrop of constantly-evolving Fourth Amendment law. The facts of the case are deceptively simple.[25. For the complete facts of the case, see Hawkins, 2010 WL 4883650, at *1.] An alarmed mother delivered her unidentified son’s cell phone to an officer with the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office, concerned that her son was receiving text messages involving narcotics sales. The officer subsequently received a text message on the son’s cell phone from Haley Hawkins – whose identity was unknown to the officer at the time – asking whether the son had “received certain controlled substances.” The officer, posing as the son, set up a drug transaction with Hawkins, and the two agreed to meet at a local restaurant later that evening.
The officer arrived prior to the agreed-upon meeting time to survey the restaurant parking lot. Hawkins soon drove into the parking lot, at which time the officer observed Hawkins “entering data into her phone.” At almost the same time, the officer received a text message on the son’s cell phone announcing Hawkins’ arrival at the restaurant parking lot. The officer arrested Hawkins, at which time Hawkins admitted that she had been texting the son’s cell phone in order to set up the drug transaction. Police thereafter searched Hawkins’s vehicle, incident to arrest, and found her cell phone inside her purse. Without obtaining a warrant, the officer searched Hawkins’ phone for the incriminating text messages, downloaded them, and printed them. Hawkins filed suit based on the officer’s conduct, alleging that the officer violated her Fourth Amendment rights by searching the electronic data stored on her cell phone without first obtaining a warrant.
Hawkins unsuccessfully moved to suppress the text messages and immediately appealed the trial court’s decision to the Court of Appeals.
The Court of Appeals’ analysis hinges on two issues: first, what, if any, exception to the warrant requirement applies in this case, and second, whether the fact that the object searched is a cell phone has any constitutional significance.
In addressing the first issue, the majority’s opinion relies almost entirely on Arizona v. Gant’s holding that when an officer arrests an occupant of a vehicle, the officer may search the passenger compartment of the vehicle for evidence, if “it is reasonable to believe that evidence of the offense of arrest might be found in the vehicle.”[27. Id. at 2.] The majority notes that although the proper scope of a search permitted by Arizona v. Gant remains unclear, the “most restrictive plausible interpretation of Gant” upholds the warrantless search of “places and things in a vehicle in which one reasonably might find the specific kinds of evidence of the crime of arrest that the officer has reason to believe might be found in the vehicle.”[28. Id.] Applying this standard, the majority finds that the Lowndes County officer had a reasonable belief that evidence of the crime of purchasing controlled substances would be contained in Hawkins’s cell phone. Hawkins and the officer had communicated exclusively through text messaging during the hours leading up to what Hawkins ostensibly believed was a drug transaction. Moreover, the officer had observed Hawkins entering data into her cell phone in the restaurant parking lot at the moment before he received a text message from Hawkins. Finally, at the time of arrest, Hawkins admitted to the officer that she had been the individual who had exchanged text messages with him throughout the day.
But what makes relevant the officer’s reasonable belief that the cell phone contained evidence of Hawkins’s crime of arrest is the majority’s determination that Gant applies to cell phones in the same way it applies to any physical container. The line of cases leading to Gant has long governed searches of both vehicle passenger compartments and “any containers therein.”[29. See Gant, 129 S. Ct. at 1712.] But, as discussed, there is disagreement as to whether a cell phone should be treated just as any other container. The majority offers a slightly nuanced approach. Following the lead of most other courts that have considered the question, the majority concludes that cell phones should, indeed, be treated like physical containers. Court also recognizes, however, some crucial differences between cell phones and containers that give pause to treating cell phones and physical containers the same way. Cell phones have the capacity to hold more, and a greater variety of, information than most traditional physical containers. Relatedly, cell phones often contain the most private personal information for which “individuals may reasonably have a substantial expectation of privacy and for which the law offers heightened protection.”[30. Hawkins, 2010 WL 4883650, at *3.] In light of these special attributes of cell phones, the Court cautions that an officer’s authority to search data on a cell phone “does not mean that he has the authority to sift through all of the data stored on the phone. Rather, the officer’s “search must be limited as much as is reasonably practicable by the object of the search.”[31. Hawkins, 2010 WL 4883650, at *4 (emphasis in original).] Because the record suggests that the officer merely searched for and found the incriminating text messages without looking for any other data on the cell phone, the Court concluded that the officer’s search of Hawkins’s cell phone was constitutionally permissible under the Fourth Amendment.
The Georgia Court of Appeals’ decision marks a substantial step in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for a number of reasons.
As an initial matter, the Courts’ opinion is important simply for the novelty of the legal question presented. Courts have certainly considered searches of vehicles incident to arrest, and a number of courts throughout the country have addressed searches of electronic devices, such as cell phones. But according to one recent commentary, only the tiniest handful of courts have considered warrantless searches of cell phones incident to arrest and even fewer have addressed warrantless searches of cell phones in automobiles incident to arrest.[32. See Jane L Knott, Is There an App for That? Reexamining the Doctrine of Search Incident to Lawful Arrest in the Context of Cell Phones, 35 Okla. City U. L. Rev. 445, 449 (2010). According to Knott, only two courts had considered cell phone searches incident to arrest as of mid-2010.] In fact, Hawkins v. State may constitute the first – or at the very least, the most recent – substantive analysis of searches incident to arrest of cell phones found in automobiles. As such, the opinion is likely to serve as persuasive authority to the plethora of courts that will almost inevitably begin considering the issue in the future.
As both Chief Judge Miller and Judge Phipps correctly note, the U.S. Supreme Court has long relied on two justifications for the search incident to arrest exception to the warrant requirement: the need to protect officers from harm and the need to preserve evidence. Indeed, the two traditional justifications—articulated most prominently in Chimel—justify Gant’s first holding that a warrantless search of a passenger compartment is permissible where the arrestee is “unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search.”[35. Gant, 129 S. Ct. at 1719.] But quite apart from that holding is the other major pronouncement in Gant, which is that a warrantless search of the passenger compartment of a vehicle is constitutionally permissible when it is “reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.”[36. Id.] The Gant Court, while offering no substantive justification for the rule, explicitly recognizes that allowing warrantless searches upon reasonable belief that evidence of the crime of arrest might be found is not justified by the traditional rationales for allowing warrantless searches incident to arrest.[37. Id.] Thus, according to the Gant Court, the rule permitting warrantless searches of cars where there is a reasonable belief that evidence of the crime of arrest might be found need not be justified by the need to protect officers or preserve evidence.
The concurrence and dissent in Hawkins, by asking whether the search was justified by the need to preserve evidence, apply an analysis that is not, strictly speaking, relevant. Nonetheless, Chief Judge Miller and Judge Phipps raise an important issue that the Gant Court has left unresolved: if the need to protect officers and preserve evidence do not justify warrantless searches where evidence of the crime of arrest might be found, what rationale does? If, in fact, there is no risk to officer safety or evidence destruction, why not require officers to obtain a warrant before searching cell phones? Courts—like the Georgia Court of Appeals—will no doubt continue to struggle with such questions.
The Court’s approach, while ostensibly reasonable, perhaps raises more questions than it answers—namely, it begs the question of how searches should be narrowed so as to balance the legitimate need to preserve evidence against the arrestee’s privacy interests. Under the Court’s approach, officers on the street—some of whom may have limited experience with cutting edge cell phone technology—must make the difficult determination of how to properly limit the scope of a given cell phone search. This determination, at minimum, will require case-by-case considerations of: the nature of the crime of arrest, the likely form and content of the incriminating data, the available functions and capabilities of the arrestee’s cell phone, and the arrestee’s privacy interests in the various forms of data contained in the phone. In short, the Court charges officers—who face the most difficult of circumstances on a regular basis—with the task of tailoring cell phone searches to the strictures of the Fourth Amendment without the benefit of any clear guidelines or rules. Until Georgia (or federal) courts offer clearer guidelines, officers may be better off seeking warrants prior to conducting searches of cell phones in the absence of any danger of evidence loss, rather than risking the admissibility of evidence by searching cell phones without warrants.
The Georgia Court of Appeal’s decision in Hawkins v. State marks a significant advance in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to the extent that it is one of the earliest—if not first—forays into the law of warrantless searches incident to arrest of cell phones found in vehicles. While the Court offers a thoughtful analysis of Arizona v. Gant, it is clear from the concurring and dissenting opinions in Hawkins that there is significant disagreement in how the Gant case should be applied. Moreover, although the it recognizes the difficulty of limiting the scope of cell phone searches, the Court seems to leave the difficult questions unanswered, perhaps leaving officers in an untenable situation—at least for the time being.

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