Ohio Court Extends 4th Amendment Protections To Cell Phones Seized in Arrests
A deeply divided Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that cell phones contain such sensitive information that law enforcement cannot automatically examine their contents when the cell phone is seized from a person being arrested. Instead, the court ruled 4-3 that the Fourth Amendment requires that the police first obtain a warrant based on probable cause before they look at an address book or call records on a cell phone.
Refreshingly, the court recognized that cell phones “have the ability to transmit large amounts of data in various forms, likening them to laptop computers, which are entitled to a higher expectation of privacy.” The court reasoned that cell phones’ ability “to store large amounts of private data gives their users a reasonable and justifiable expectation of a higher level of privacy in the information they contain… because a person has a high expectation of privacy in a cell phone’s contents, police must then obtain a warrant before intruding into the phone’s contents.”
The court looked forward and accounted for the way technology is evolving: cell phones are getting smarter, and will in the future have very powerful computing power and contain more and more personal information about transactions, associations, and activities.
This information should not be put out of the reach of law enforcement, and the court didn’t do that. Rather, it said, the police have to have a good reason to get it — probable cause of crime — and they have to prove that they have probable cause to a judge. A automatic search “incident to arrest” of the contents of the cell phone was unnecessary for the safety of law enforcement officers, and there was plenty of time to get a warrant because the police had already seized the phone when they made the arrest, the court reasoned.
The courts have split on this issue. A federal circuit court in U.S. v. Finley, 477 F. 3d 250 (5th Cir. 2007) ruled that the cell phone of an arrestee can be searched without a warrant, and the federal district court in U.S. v. Park, 2007 WL 1521573 (N.D. Cal. May 23, 2007) ruled that a warrant is required. The Ohio court agreed with the latter decision.
It makes sense to extend the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement to cell phones seized from arrestees. They, today, carry a wealth of a user’s personal information, and will carry even more such information in the future. We’ve often said at CDT that the law needs to keep pace with technology; in this Ohio case, it did.
