B. Reasonable Expectations of Privacy and Unconstitutional Property Invasions
Grady v. North Carolina, 575 U. S. ___, 135 S.Ct. 1368 (2015) (per curiam) (Petitioner was convicted in North Carolina of a second degree sexual offense in 1997 and of taking indecent liberties with a child in 2006. After completion of his sentence on his second conviction, petitioner was ordered to appear in a County Superior Court for a hearing to determine whether he should be subjected to satellite-based monitoring (SBM) as a recidivist sex offender as authorized by North Carolina law. Although petitioner did not challenge his status as a recidivist under the relevant North Carolina statutes, he nevertheless claimed that the "monitoring program—under which he would be forced to wear tracking devices at all times—would violate his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures." The trial court was not convinced and, as a result, petitioner was ordered into the SBM program where he would be electronically monitored for the rest of his life. In his appeal, petitioner relied on United States v. Jones, 565 U. S. ___, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012) (police officers had engaged in an unconstitutional "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when they installed and monitored a GPS tracking device on a suspect's car) and asserted it governed the SBM monitoring. In a nutshell, petitioner claimed that "if affixing a GPS to an individual's vehicle constitutes a search of the individual, then the arguably more intrusive act of affixing an ankle bracelet to an individual must constitute a search of the individual as well." The North Carolina Appellate Court disagreed while ruling that "[t]he context presented in the instant case—which involves a civil SBM proceeding—is readily distinguishable from that presented in Jones, where the Court considered the propriety of a search in the context of a motion to suppress evidence." The North Carolina Supreme Court denied petitioner's request for discretionary review and in effect affirmed the trial and appellate courts' findings. HELD: The North Carolina courts' wholesale rejection of petitioner's claim is quite problematic. "The only explanation provided below for the rejection of [petitioner's] challenge is ... that the State's system of nonconsensual satellite-based monitoring does not entail a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That theory is inconsistent with this Court's precedents." In Jones, this Court "stressed the importance of the fact that the Government had 'physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.'" This property-based approach to the Fourth Amendment made it unnecessary to inquire whether the defendant's expectation of privacy was infringed. In Florida v. Jardines, 569 U. S. ___ , 133 U.S. 1409 (2013) (where policed have a drug-sniffing dog nose around a suspect's front porch, this amounted to a search because police had "gathered . . . information by physically entering and occupying the [curtilage of the house] to engage in conduct not explicitly or implicitly permitted by the homeowner"), the Court reaffirmed this principle. "In light of these decisions, it follows that a State also conducts a search when it attaches a device to a person's body, without consent, for the purpose of tracking that individual's movements." Further, it appears the North Carolina court "placed decisive weight on the fact that the State's monitoring program is civil in nature." Yet, "the Fourth Amendment's protection extends beyond the sphere of criminal investigations," Ontario v. Quon, 560 U. S. 746 (2010) (monitoring government employee's usage of police department-provided pager was a search), and the government's purpose in collecting information does not control whether the method of collection constitutes a search." Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U. S. 523 (1967) (municipality's housing inspections to insure safety are "administrative searches" that must comply with the Fourth Amendment). In this case, the "State's program is plainly designed to obtain information. And since it does so by physically intruding on a subject's body, it effects a Fourth Amendment search." Yet, this finding does not resolve the ultimate question of the monitoring's constitutionality for the "Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches." Because the "North Carolina courts did not examine whether the State's monitoring program is reasonable— when properly viewed as a search—and we will not do so in the first instance," the North Carolina Supreme Court's ruling must be vacated and this matter remanded to the lower courts for further proceedings not inconsistent with this [Court's] opinion").
Riley v. California, ___ U.S. ___ , 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014) (The case combines two cases concerning whether the police may search digital information on a cell phone, without a warrant, seized from an individual who has been arrested. The first case involved defendant Riley, who was pulled over because his registration tags were out of date. A background check by the officer revealed that Riley was driving on a suspended license. Riley's vehicle was impounded and subsequently searched. The search resulted in the finding of two handguns, and Riley was charged with possession of concealed and loaded firearms. A search incident to arrest led to the finding of ganged-related items of Riley's person. An officer searched Riley's phone and found gang-related language. Later, a detective specializing in gangs further searched Riley's phone. The detective found photos of Riley in front of a car the police suspected of being involved in an attempted murder, with which Riley was eventually charged. Riley filed a motion to suppress all evidence obtained from the cell phone, arguing that the police lacked a warrant and there were no exigent circumstances. The trial court denied Riley's motion. Riley was later convicted at trial. The California Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court's ruling on appeal. The second case involved the arrest of defendant Wurie for making an apparent drug sale from his vehicle. Wurie was arrested and taken to the station, where the police seized Wurie's cell phone. The officers noticed that the cell phone was repeatedly receiving calls from a number labeled "my house." Believing this to be the number of Wurie's home, the police traced the number. The police went to the apartment and secured it while obtaining a search warrant. The search of Wurie's home led to the finding of 215 grams of crack cocaine and marijuana among other incriminating evidence. Wurie was charged with distribution and possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance. Wurie made a motion to suppress evidence found in his apartment, arguing it was fruit of an unconstitutional search of his cell phone. The trial court denied the motion and Wurie was later convicted. On appeal, the United State Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the denial of Wurie's motion to suppress and vacated his convictions. The First Circuit held that cell phones are distinct from other physical possessions that may be searched incident to arrest. HELD: A warrantless search is reasonable only if it falls with a specific exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment. "Absent more precise guidance from the founding era, we generally determine whether to exempt a given type of search from the warrant requirement 'by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual's privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.'" Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U.S. 295 (1999). Three Court decisions that have addressed the search incident to arrest doctrine are Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969), United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218 (1973), and Arizona v. Gant, 556 U. S. 332 (2009). Chimel allowed a search incident to arrest limited to the area within the arrestee's immediate control that it is justified by officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence. Robinson extended Chimel saying that the two Chimel risks were present in all custodial arrests and held that a valid custodial arrest automatically justifies such a search. Gant permits a search incident to arrest of a passenger compartment of a vehicle if it is within reaching distance of an arrestee. Also, in the automobile context, Gant states a separate exception for a warrantless search of a vehicle's passenger compartment is authorized "when it is reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle." However, the reasoning in these cases does not cover searches of data stored on a cell phone. The categorical rule in Robinson "strikes the appropriate balance in the context of physical objects, [but] neither of its rationales has much force with respect to digital content on cell phones. The digital data on a phone cannot be used as a weapon. Of course, "[o]fficers may examine the phone's physical aspects to ensure that it will not be used as a weapon, but the data on the phone can endanger no one." While Robinson provides the arrest diminishes the privacy interest of the arrestee, the privacy interest in cell phones are huge because they contain a digital record of nearly every aspect of a person's life. A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee's pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but any extension of that reasoning to digital data has to rest on its own bottom. * * * Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee's person. The term 'cell phone' is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a...
