Riley v. California
David Leon Riley, Petitioner v. California. United States, Petitioner v. Brima Wurie.
- Court
- Supreme Court of the United States (U.S. Supreme Court)
- Decided
- 2014
- Citation
- 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014)
- Standard applied
- Fourth Amendment — search incident to arrest
What the court held
Police generally may not search the digital contents of a cell phone seized incident to an arrest without a warrant. The search-incident-to-arrest exception, which rests on officer safety and preservation of evidence, does not extend to the data on a phone.
Why
The Court treated a modern phone as categorically different from the physical items the exception was built around: its storage capacity, the breadth and combination of data types it aggregates, and its reach into cloud-held records mean a phone search exposes far more than an arrest-scene inventory ever did. Neither rationale for the exception carried over with force — data on a phone cannot harm an officer, and the government's remote-wiping and encryption concerns were answered by measures short of a warrantless search.
“Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant.”
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Riley is the case that made a warrant the working assumption for any phone examination, and it reframed the device as a window onto the privacies of life rather than a container found in a pocket. For an examiner it converts a legal rule into a workflow requirement: know which warrant authorises the extraction in front of you and what it actually covers. Its reasoning about aggregation is also the engine of the cases that followed, Carpenter included.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: cell phone search · search incident to arrest · warrant
Cited 1,313times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on fourth amendment and privacy & surveillance
- United States v. JonesSupreme Court of the United States · 2012Attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Th…
- Carpenter v. United StatesSupreme Court of the United States · 2018The government's acquisition of historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a Fourth Amendment search, and generally requires a warrant…
- United States v. WarshakCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit · 2010A subscriber has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of e-mails stored with, or sent or received through, a commercial internet service provider…
- In re Application of the United States for Historical Cell Site DataCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · 2013Court orders authorised by the Stored Communications Act compelling cell-phone service providers to produce subscribers' historical cell-site information are no…
- United States v. GrahamCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit · 2016Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit held that a cell-phone user has no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site location information held by hi…
- United States v. DavisCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit · 2015Sitting en banc, the Eleventh Circuit held that a court order under § 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act compelling a telephone company to produce its bus…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.