文章基本信息

标题：Searches of Cell Phones Incident to Arrest: Overview of the Law as It Stands and a New Path Forward
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作者：Patrick Brown
期刊名称：Harvard Journal of Law and Technology
印刷版ISSN：0897-3393
出版年度：2014
卷号：27
期号：2
出版社：William S Hein
摘要：In a series of cases in the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court e s- tablished that, incident to a lawful arrest, police officers may search items found on the arrestee's person.1In the past decade, however, courts have struggled with how to extend the search incident to arrest ("SIA") doctrine to searches of the contents of arrestees' smartphones. The confused state of the law is evident from four decisions in the Northern District of California. In 1993, the court held that although an arrestee had a "protected privacy interest in the contents of [a] pag-er's memory,"those privacy interests becameirrelevant when "the pager was searched incident to [a lawful] arrest."2In 2007, a different judge in the same district struck down police officers' search of an arrestee's cell phone in United States v. Parkbecause "modern cellu-lar phones have the capacity for storing immense amounts of private information"and thereforeshould be treated differently from other objects.3In 2011, a judge in the district declined to follow Parkand instead upheld a nearly identical cell phone search because an ar-restee's "iPhone should not be treated any differently than... a wallet taken from [an arrestee's]person."4However,in 2012, another judge in the district, without citing either previous case, again reversed course. That judge adopted Park's reasoning in holding that "[i]ndividuals store highly personal information on their cell phones, including private thoughts, emails, photos, and voice messages,"so cell phones found on an arrestee's person merit different treatment than other objects.