The Strife of Riley: The Search-Incident Consequences of Making an Easy Case Simple

• Author: Leslie A. Shoebotham
• Pages: 28-70

Louisiana Law Review



















 



The Strife of Riley: The Search-Incident

Consequences of Making an Easy Case Simple

Leslie A. Shoebotham*

ABSTRACT

In Riley v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth

Amendment requires police officers to obtain a warrant before

searching an arrestee’s cellular phone in a search incident to a lawful

arrest. The lauded decision heralds the modernization of the Fourth

Amendment to embrace privacy in the digital age. But Riley’s

reasoning contains a flaw that only Justice Alito recognized. Evidence

gathering—i.e., the need to look for evidence of the arrestee’s crime

for use at trial—has long justified law enforcement’s authority to

perform incident searches. Indeed, evidence-gathering searches

incident to arrest were recognized as legitimate searches over a

century before the adoption of the Fourth Amendment. The Riley

Court ignored this pedigree, however. Despite the doctrine’s

centuries-long history, Riley concluded that the authority to search

incident to arrest was defined by a trilogy of cases—California v.

Chimel, United States v. Robinson, and Arizona v. Gant—cases that

date back only to 1969. Based on the Chimel line, Riley concluded that

the justifications for performing an incident search were limited to

officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence. And the only

evidence-gathering incident search that Riley recognized was based

on Gant; an incident search of the passenger compartment of an

arrestee’s vehicle that Riley justified solely on the “unique

circumstances” involved in the automobile context, not the search-

incident doctrine’s historical evidence-gathering basis. Therein lies

the concern. By ignoring the doctrine’s evidence-gathering history,

Riley has reorganized the search-incident doctrine into a rigid

Chimel-based rule that just so happens to have a vehicle exception.

This Article amplifies Justice Alito’s admonition that evidence

gathering must be recognized as a legitimate justification for police to

search incident to arrest. This Article addresses the conseq uences of

Riley’s digital-age reboot of the search-incident doctrine,

especially Riley’s limitation of Gant to the vehicle context—a

restriction that was, ironically enough, not necessary for imposing

Copyright 2014, by LESLIE A. SHOEBOTHAM.

* Victor H. Schiro Professor of Law, Loyola University New Orleans

College of Law; LL.M., Tulane University School of Law; J.D., University of

Houston Law Center; B.S.N., University of Texas Medical Branch. I would like

to thank my research assistants, Andrea Jones and H. Rick Yelton, for their

excellent research skills in preparing this Article.

30 LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 75

a warrant requirement on cell phone searches. Rather than relying

solely on Chimel’s two “concerns,” this Article argues that the

search-incident doctrine has been supported—both before and

after Chimel—by three justifications: officer safety, preservation of

evidence, and importantly, the need to discover evidence of the

crime of arrest. Without evidence gathering as an implicit

justification in a properly limited search incident to arrest, Riley’s

limitation of Gant calls into doubt law enforcement’s authority to

perform an incident search of an arrestee’s reaching distance—a

Chimel search—to look for evidence of the arrestee’s crime once

the arrestee has been handcuffed and is adequately secured. All

things considered, Riley represents much more than a common-

sense warrant requirement for cell phone searches. Riley is the

deceptively simple beginning of the end of evidence gathering as a

justification in a properly limited search incident to arrest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ..........................................................................................29

Introduction ....................................................................................31

I. Riley v. California: The Savior of Cell Phone Privacy ..........36

II. The Search-Incident-to-Arrest Doctrine: An Ancient Rule ...41

A. Evidence-Gathering Searches Incident to Arrest:

The Search-Incident Doctrine’s Original Rationale.........44

B. The Pendulum Swings in Chimel v. California ...............48

C. The Pendulum Swings Again: A Doctrine in

Transition .........................................................................58

III. Riley’s Impact: Beyond the Cell Phone Context ....................60

A. The Doctrinal Implications of Reconfiguring Gant .........60

B. Restricting Gant’s Evidence-Gathering Search to

Vehicles ............................................................................64

C. Procurement of Evid ence: A Condition Precedent

to Preservation .................................................................67

IV. Conclusion .............................................................................69