California High Court Upholds Warrantless Cellphone Searches
The California Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that police may search an arrested suspect’s cellphone without a search warrant. The Ohio Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion last year.
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The majority decision in California, written by Justice Ming Chin, cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings from the 1970s upholding searches of cigarette packages, U.S. v. Robinson, and crumpled clothing, U.S. v. Edwards, seized during an arrest. “We granted review in this case to decide whether the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution permits law enforcement officers, approximately 90 minutes after lawfully arresting a suspect and transporting him to a detention facility, to conduct a warrantless search of the text message folder of a cellphone they take from his person after the arrest,” Chin wrote in a ruling released Monday. “We hold that, under the United States Supreme Court’s binding precedent, such a search is valid as being incident to a lawful custodial arrest.”
Gregory Diaz drove a dealer to a 2007 drug deal set up by a police informant. Six tabs of the drug Ecstasy changed hands for $80. Diaz was arrested and when police checked his phone they found a message that read “6 4 80.” Police showed the message to Diaz saying it meant the buyer got “six pills of Ecstasy for $80” and confirmed that he knew the sale had taken place in the backseat of his car. Diaz admitted participating in the sale but later pleaded not guilty and moved to suppress the evidence from the cellphone. The trial court denied the motion and Diaz changed his plea to guilty. He received a suspended sentence and three years’ probation.
"We hold that the cellphone was ‘immediately associated with [defendant’s] person,’ and that the warrantless search of the cell phone therefore was valid,” Chin wrote. “The relevant high court decisions do not support the view that whether police must get a warrant before searching an item they have properly seized from an arrestee’s person incident to a lawful custodial arrest depends on the item’s character, including its capacity for storing personal information."
The court misread the high court’s decades-old decisions, Justice Kathryn Werdegar said in a dissent joined by another justice. “In my view, electronic communication and data storage devices carried on the person -- cellular phones, smartphones and handheld computers -- are not sufficiently analogous to the clothing considered in Edwards or the crumpled cigarette package in Robinson to justify a blanket exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement,” she wrote.
The Ohio Supreme Court last year held that a warrantless cellphone search violated a defendant’s Fourth Amendment protections. The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.