warrants

Our guest author of this is article is Doug Plank, a legal research attorney with National Legal Research Group in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In what some commentators have described as the most important criminal law decision of its 2013-2014 Term, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014), that before police may search the contents of a cell phone seized after an arrest, they must first obtain a search warrant. In reaching this determination, which is a departure from the Court’s general rule that a person’s belongings may be searched without a warrant incident to an arrest of that person, the Court found that “[c]ell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee’s person.” Id. at 2489. In […]