California’s highest court leaned on old U.S. Supreme Court cases to rule that police can confiscate a cell phone from a suspect right after he’s arrested and sift through text messages looking for evidence, and do so without first obtaining a warrant, the Ventura County Star reports.
The ruling came as part of a Fourth Amendment decision involving the 2007 arrest of a Thousand Oaks man who wound up arrested after buying ecstasy from a police informant. Text messages on the suspect’s cell phone implicated him of the crime.
Jay Leiderman, the criminal lawyer who represented the suspect, described the decision as “weak” and “scary” because it cited older U.S. Supreme Court cases that don’t have anything to do with today’s technology.
“This type of thing opens up the doors for Big Brother to come flying in,” he said.
The decision relied on a pair of cases from the early 1970s, one which involved the search of a suspect’s clothing and another involving the search of small physical containers, like a crumpled cigarette package.
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