First Page
585
Abstract
Last year, in Riley v. California, the Supreme Court required police to procure a warrant before searching a cell phone. Unfortunately, the Court's assumption that requiring search warrants would be "simple" and very protective of privacy was overly optimistic. This article reviews lower court decisions in the year since Riley and finds that the search warrant requirement is far less protective than expected. Rather than restricting search warrants to the narrow evidence being sought, some magistrates have issued expansive warrants authorizing a search of the entire contents of the phone with no restrictions whatsoever. Other courts have authorized searches of applications and data for which no probable cause existed. And even when district and appellate courts have found these overbroad search warrants to be defective, they have almost always turned to the good faith exception to save the searches and allow admission of the evidence. This Article calls on courts to take the Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement seriously before issuing search warrants for cell
Recommended Citation
Adam M. Gershowitz,
The Post-Riley Search Warrant: Search Protocols and Particularity in Cell Phone Searches,
69 Vanderbilt Law Review
585
(2016)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol69/iss3/1