DAVID LEON RILEY v. CALIFORNIA AND UNITED STATES v. WURIE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 134 S..

DAVID LEON RILEY v. CALIFORNIA AND UNITED STATES v. WURIE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 134 S. CT. 2473 (2014) Defendant Riley was stopped for driving with expired tags, which eventually led to his arrest on weapons charges. An officer searching Riley incident to the arrest seized a cell phone from Rileys pants pocket. Based in part on cell phone data, the State charged Riley in connection with a shooting that had occurred a few weeks earlier and sought an enhanced sentence based on Rileys gang membership. Riley moved to suppress all evidence that the police had obtained from his
DAVID LEON RILEY v. CALIFORNIA AND UNITED STATES v. WURIE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 134 S. CT. 2473 (2014) Defendant Riley was stopped for driving with expired tags, which eventually led to his arrest on weapons charges. An officer searching Riley incident to the arrest seized a cell phone from Rileys pants pocket. Based in part on cell phone data, the State charged Riley in connection with a shooting that had occurred a few weeks earlier and sought an enhanced sentence based on Rileys gang membership. Riley moved to suppress all evidence that the police had obtained from his cell phone. The trial court denied the motion, and Riley was convicted. The California Court of Appeal affirmed. After police observed Wurie participating in an apparent drug sale, they arrested him. At the police station, officers seized a cell phone in his possession, and based on data on his phone, secured a search warrant for his apartment and found drugs, a firearm and ammunition, and cash in the ensuing search. Wurie was then charged with drug and firearm offenses. He moved to suppress the evidence obtained from the search of the apartment. The District Court denied the motion, and Wurie was convicted. The First Circuit reversed the denial of the motion to suppress and vacated the relevant convictions. The Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from both cases together. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS_These two cases raise a common question: whether the police may, without a warrant, search digital information on a cell phone seized from an individual who has been arrested. . . . The two cases before us concern the reasonableness of a warrantless search incident to a lawful arrest. . . . it has been well accepted that such a search constitutes an exception to the warrant requirement. Although the existence of the exception for such searches has been recognized for a century, its scope has been debated for nearly as long. . . . Three related precedents set forth the rules governing such searches: [In] the first, Chimel v. California, the Court crafted the following rule for assessing the reasonableness of a search incident to arrest: When an arrest is made, it is reasonable for the arresting officer to search the person arrested in order to remove any weapons that the latter might seek to use in order to resist arrest or effect his escape. Otherwise, the officers safety might well be endangered, and the arrest itself frustrated. In addition, it is entirely reasonable for the arresting officer to search for and seize any evidence on the arrestees person in order to prevent its concealment or destruction. . . . There is ample justification, therefore, for a search of the arrestees person and the area within his immediate controlconstruing that phrase to mean the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence. Four years later, in United States v. Robinson, the Court applied the Chimel analysis in the context of a search of the arrestees person. . . . [A] custodial arrest of a suspect based on probable cause is a reasonable intrusion under the Fourth Amendment; that intrusion being lawful, a search incident to the arrest requires no additional justification. A few years later, the Court clarified that this exception was limited to personal property . . . immediately associated with the person of the arrestee. The search incident to arrest trilogy concludes with Gant, which analyzed searches of an arrestees vehicle. Gant, like Robinson, recognized that the Chimel concerns for officer safety and evidence preservation underlie the search incident to arrest exception. . . . As a result, the Court concluded that Chimel could authorize police to search a vehicle only when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search. . . . 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… [W]e generally determine whether to exempt a given type of search from the warrant requirement by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individuals privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests. . . . Such a balancing of interests supported the search incident to arrest exception in Robinson. . . But while Robinsons categorical rule strikes the appropriate balance in the context of physical objects, neither of its rationales has much force with respect to digital content on cell phones. On the government interest side, Robinson concluded that the two risks identified in Chimel harm to officers and destruction of evidenceare present in all custodial arrests. There are no comparable risks when the search is of digital data. In addition, Robinson regarded any privacy interests retained by an individual after arrest as significantly diminished by the fact of the arrest itself. Cell phones, however, place vast quantities of personal information literally in the hands of individuals. A search of the information on a cell phone bears little resemblance to the type of brief physical search considered in Robinson. We therefore decline to extend Robinson to searches of data on cell phones… We first consider each Chimel concern in turn. . . . 1. The search incident to arrest exception rests not only on the heightened government interests at stake in a volatile arrest situation, but also on an arrestees reduced privacy interests upon being taken into police custody. . . . The fact that an arrestee has diminished privacy interests does not mean that the Fourth Amendment falls out of the picture entirely. Not every search is acceptable solely because a person is in custody. . . . [T]he possible intrusion on privacy is not physically limited in the same way when it comes to cell phones. The current top-selling smart phone has a standard capacity of 16 gigabytes). Sixteen gigabytes translates to millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures, or hundreds of videos. . . . The storage capacity of cell phones has several interrelated consequences for privacy. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of informationan address, a note, a prescription, a bank statement, a videothat reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second, a cell phones capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible. The sum of an individuals private life can be reconstructed through a thousand photographs labeled with dates, locations, and descriptions; the same cannot be said of a photograph or two of loved ones tucked into a wallet. Third, the data on a phone can date back to the purchase of the phone, or even earlier. 2. The United States and California focus primarily on the second Chimel rationale: preventing the destruction of evidence. Both Riley and Wurie concede that officers could have seized and secured their cell phones to prevent destruction of evidence while seeking a warrant. . . . And once law enforcement officers have secured a cell phone, there is no longer any risk that the arrestee himself will be able to delete incriminating data from the phone . . . The United States and California argue that information on a cell phone may nevertheless be vulnerable to two types of evidence destruction unique to digital dataremote wiping and data encryption. . . . We have also been given little reason to believe that either problem is prevalent. . . . Learned Hand observed that it is a totally different thing to search a mans pockets and use against him what they contain, from ransacking his house for everything which may incriminate him. . . . 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 formunless the phone is. 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, . . . 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 simpleget a warrant. Judgment of the California Court of Appeal reversed and remanded. Judgment of the First Circuit affirmed. CRITICAL THINKING The court analogized between the search of a cell phone and the search of a house. How strong is this analogy? ETHICAL REASONING What ethical norm is furthered by this decision? What ethical norm is being sacrificed?

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