§ 12.06 CALIFORNIA: THE CELL PHONE CASE

• Jurisdiction: North Carolina

§ 12.06. Riley v. California: The Cell Phone Case

Times change, and the questions and controversy concerning the scope of police authority under the SILA exception change with them. In Riley v. California,⁷⁹ the Court faced the following question: May the police, under the SILA exception, conduct a warrantless search of digital information on a cell phone seized from an individual who has been arrested? The Court's unanimous answer was no.

Riley covered two different cases. In the first case, R was stopped for driving with expired registration tags and then arrested for firearm possession on the basis of guns the police found in the car R was driving. R was searched incident to his arrest, and the police removed his "smart phone" from his pants pocket. The police later discovered photos on R's phone showing R in front of a car the police suspected had been involved in a recent shooting. R was subsequently charged, convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison in connection with those shootings, in part on the basis of the evidence from his cell phone.

In the second case, the police observed W making a drug sale from a car. W was arrested and, at the police station, the police took two cell phones from W's person. They used photo and contact information on the phone (a particular number was labeled "my house") to locate W's residence. On the basis of this information, the police obtained a search warrant for the residence. As a result of the subsequent search of the apartment, W was charged and convicted on three possession counts related to drugs and firearms and was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for eight members of the Court, began by reviewing the "search incident to arrest trilogy" of Chimel,⁸⁰ Robinson,⁸¹ and Gant,⁸² and noted that "a mechanical application of Robinson might well support the warrantless searches here." That "mechanical" reasoning would be: (i) the cell phones were properly taken from the arrestee's person under the SILA exception; (ii) police inspection of the contents of the cell phones was permissible because the SILA exception allows searching the inside of objects seized incident to arrest (such as the cigarette package in Robinson); and (iii) under Robinson, there is no case-by-case consideration of whether the underlying justifications for the SILA exception apply. Yet the Court rejected this path. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that while the "categorical rule strikes the...