Riley v. California

Date: June 25, 2014

Citation: 573 US ‗‗‗‗ (2014)

Issue: Fourth Amendment

Significance: In a unanimous decision, the Court extended Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure to the warrantless search of the contents of a cell phone, thereby protecting the right to privacy of digital data in the absence of a search warrant.

Background

One of the fundamental rights established in the Bill of Rights is the protection "against unreasonable searches and seizures" stated in the Fourth Amendment. In order to search the possessions of an individual, police must secure a warrant. However, in making an arrest, police officers are given some ability to search a person and relevant possessions, such as a car. Sometimes, disputes arise as to the constitutionality of those searches. Riley v. California actually involved the appeal of two related cases involving the legal limits of searches that the Court combined.

In the first, David Leon Riley was arrested by San Diego police in August 2009 for driving a car with an expired license. Riley had a cell phone, which was taken by the police. One officer, looking at videos and photos on Riley’s cell phone, found evidence that he had been involved in a gang-related shooting nearly three weeks earlier. On the basis of that evidence, Riley was charged with additional crimes, including attempted murder. Riley tried to have the cell phone evidence suppressed on the grounds that his cell phone was searched without a warrant. The trial judge dismissed the claim, Riley was convicted, and he was sentenced to fifteen years for the shooting. A California appeals court upheld the conviction. The California Supreme Court declined, but the US Supreme Court accepted the case.

In the second case, a police officer arrested Brima Wurie, of Massachusetts, for selling drugs. Police used information from Wurie’s cell phone to identify his address, obtained a search warrant, searched his apartment, and found a store of drugs and drug equipment. Wurie was convicted in federal district court. A federal appeals court overturned the conviction on Fourth Amendment grounds. The federal government, which had prosecuted the case, appealed to the Supreme Court to review it.

Opinion of the Court

All nine justices agreed that the police action in the two cases violated the Fourth Amendment and overturned the convictions. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision. Roberts granted that the Court had long accepted as a "reasonable" search, allowed without a warrant, any search conducted "to discover and seize the fruits or evidences of crime" (quoting Weeks v. United States [1914]). These allowances are exceptions to the general rule that police require warrants to conduct searches, and earlier cases explored limits to that exception. In Chimel v. California (1969), the Court ruled against a warrantless search because it was not necessary either to protect the police officers’ safety or prevent the loss of evidence. In United States v. Robinson (1973), the Court permitted the search of a pack of cigarettes found on a suspect’s person because of a reasonable concern over potential loss of evidence.

The chief justice then explored the significant capabilities and storage capacities of cell phones. Cell phones are so different in kind from other objects, Roberts reasoned, that the rules from precedent do not apply: "A search of the information on a cell phone bears little resemblance to the type of brief physical search considered in Robinson." While police can search a cell phone case to determine if, say, a razor blade that could be used against them is inside, they cannot search the data without a warrant. Roberts concluded that the privacy concerns raised by digital information on a cell phone is fundamentally different from those related to the search of other physical objects:

• 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.

Impact

The Court’s decision was clearly significant, as it addressed a major legal issue arising from contemporary digital technology. Interestingly, Chief Justice Roberts hearkened back to the nation’s founding in addressing privacy concerns raised by twenty-first century technology. He related American colonists’ outrage in the 1760s over the "writs of assistance," which, he wrote, "allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity." This remembered outrage, and the desire to protect privacy from an overly powerful government, prompted adoption of the Fourth Amendment just a few decades later. "The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand [in a cell phone] does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought," Roberts wrote.

In creating this privacy protection, Roberts conceded that the Court was making the job of police officers somewhat more difficult. But it was not making that work impossible. "Privacy comes at a cost," he wrote. But, he emphasized, the decision does not mean police are barred from gaining access to or using digital data. It simply means that they must follow due process in order to gain that access: "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." William Clark (2014), examining two cases in lower courts, suggested that those warrants would have to include detailed protocols of what the police were searching for and how they planned to conduct the search. Bernard James (2015) argued that the Riley decision could undercut a New Jersey Supreme Court decision that had allowed searches of high school students by school officials.

Riley is related to two other Court decisions that addressed new technological means of gathering evidence. In Kyllo v. United States (2001), a 5–4 Court decision determined that police use of remote thermal sensing to detect use in a suspect’s home of high-intensity lamps employed to grow marijuana was an unconstitutional warrantless search. On the other hand, in Maryland v. King (2013), the Court said—against a strong dissent—that police could collect the DNA of an arrested person without a warrant. The Harvard Law Review (2014) argued that the Court’s pro-privacy ruling in Riley was an anomaly.

Bibliography

"Bill of Rights." The Charters of Freedom. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

Clark, William. "Protecting the Privacies of Digital Life: Riley v. California, the Fourth Amendment’s Particularity Requirement, and Search Protocols for Cell Phone Search Warrants." Boston College Law Review 56.5 (2015): 1981–2018. Print.

"Fourth Amendment—Search and Seizure—Searching Cell Phones Incident to Arrest—Riley v. California." Harvard Law Review 128.1 (2014): 251–260. Print.

James, Bernard. "T.L.O. and Cell Phone: Student Privacy and Smart Devices After Riley v. California. Iowa Law Review 101.1 (2015): 343–370. Print.

"Kyllo v. United States." Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court of the U.S., 2001. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.

"Maryland v. King." Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court of the U.S., 2012. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.

"Riley v. California." Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court of the U.S., 2014. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

"Riley v. California." Oyez. Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Tech, n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.