Supreme court rules police need warrant to search cell phones

Supreme court rules police need warrant to search cell phones
December 27th, 2009

In what is considered a landmark decision, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that police need warrants before they can search people’s cell phones.

The ruling, the first in a state supreme court, is expected to serve as a model for other courts to follow, according to an editorial in The New York Times.

The ruling stems from an arrest of a man on drug charges where police searched through his cell phone without his consent.

When the police arrested Antwaun Smith on drug charges they seized his cellphone and searched it, examining his call records. The police did not have a warrant or the consent of Mr. Smith.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled this month, by a 4-to-3 vote, that the search violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Rather than seeing a cellphone as a simple closed container, the majority noted that modern cellphones — especially ones that permit Internet access — are “capable of storing a wealth of digitized information.”

This is information, the court said, for which people reasonably have a high expectation of privacy, and under established Fourth Amendment principles, police officers must get a search warrant before they can look through call logs or examine other data. The court wisely decided that it made no sense to try to distinguish among various kinds of cellphones based on what specific functions they have. All cellphones, the court said, fall under the search warrant requirement.

Few federal courts have considered the issue of cellphone searches, and they have disagreed about whether a warrant should be required. The Ohio ruling eloquently makes the case for why the very personal information that new forms of technology aggregate must be accorded a significant degree of privacy.