At the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) website, Brianne Gorod: The "Papers and Effects"on Your Cell Phone May Not Be as Private as You Think.
This week, CAC filed an amicus curiae brief in the United States Supreme Court in Riley v. California, urging the High Court to review this case, which involves the search of petitioner David Riley’s cell phone in the absence of a warrant and exigent circumstances, first at the scene of his arrest and then hours later at the police station. The California Court of Appeal upheld this search. In our brief, we urge the Supreme Court to grant certiorari—i.e., agree to hear the case—and to hold that the warrantless search violated the text and history of the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment broadly protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and also provides that “no Warrants shall issue” unless they “particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” When the Framers adopted this Amendment, they were responding, in large part, to the British use of “general warrants” and “writs of assistance.” These warrants and writs lacked any specificity about the people or items to be searched and were not predicated on any individualized suspicion; essentially unlimited in scope, they allowed the officers executing them virtually unfettered discretion to engage in broad searches of a person’s home and the personal papers and effects in that home.
Related: My colleague Don Dripps has an outstanding article on the original meaning of "papers and effects," noted here.
Posted at 6:16 AM