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Florida Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant To Search Cell Phones
An anonymous reader writes "In a case stemming from a Jacksonville burglary, the Florida Supreme Court ruled 5-2 Thursday that police must get a search warrant before searching someone's cell phone. 'At this time, we cannot ignore that a significant portion of our population relies upon cell phones for email communications, text message information, scheduling, and banking,' read the majority opinion (PDF), authored by Justice Fred Lewis. 'The position of the dissent, which would permit the search here even though no issue existed with regard to officer safety or evidence preservation, is both contrary to, and the antithesis of, the fundamental protections against government intrusion guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.'"
Hey, Florida's not all that bad.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Somebody check for snow in Tallahassee!
This will probably wind up in the Supreme Court eventually. I've been looking forward to that day.
What exactly makes a cellphone (or any digital device) different than any other personal posession? Why did it take a special court ruling (and probably millions of dollars) to "clarify" this "issue"? Does the law (and the constitution) not already state that a person cannot be searched without due process?
Where in the world did this confusion come from?
Cell phones are carried about on your person. Historically, when you are arrested, the police review and inventory items on your possession. They are able to do so because they are arresting you. Any evidence found on your person is admissible in court. However, the modern day cell phone often extends above and beyond the things that a normal person might carry on their person. You might have thousands of messages, emails, your bank statements, and other personal and confidential information you do not make a habit of carrying with you. If the police need access to that information, and have probable cause, then they should have to get a warrant to do so. Just as they would need a warrant to review my call logs, my bank statement, or to search through my house.
For the same reason you can patent ancient chestnuts by suffixing the claims with "...in a mobile device." All bets are off and no claim is too outrageous.
The powers assume you don't have civil rights until some court says you do. Even the words on a 200-year-old scrap of parchment are re-parsed with each new technological advance (printing press, telegraphy, telephones, etc.) because there are people in power for whom your clearly stated rights are an obstacle to their goals... so your rights are not applicable in this particular case until someone slaps them on the wrist and tells them that the right does, in fact, still apply.
This is the ugly truth behind the often-quoted maxim "the law doesn't keep up with technology." The people behind the law have a vested interest in making sure the established protections of the rule of law can't be applied in as many circumstances as possible, and work hard to redefine each new technological plateau as a new frontier of surveillance, seizure, and self-incrimination.
The men behind the Bill of Rights understood this. This is why we even have a Bill of Rights: because the government needs a standing restraint order against stalking their citizens.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The Supreme court shouldn't even be allowed to hear this case( and wasn't the original intent of duty of the supreme court), nor the case from California regarding gay marriage nor any other law that the relevant states supreme court has already ruled on.
The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over federal matters. In the case of gay marriage, a federal statute called the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated. If you paid attention to the arguments, the justices questioned why the federal statute was necessary and whether it interfered with the states' right to define marriage. That was one part of the cases.
The second part is whether California can define marriage differently than other states. When it comes to legal differences between states, that is appropriate for SCOTUS.
There is a REASON why each state has a supreme court. 7 black robes in Washington should not be overturning/hearing on individual state laws/rulings unless the founding papers of this great land specifically gave the Supreme Court the power to do so.
There are federal implications in the case of gay marriage.
In this particular case, every state ought to have a ruling on this subject and be done with it instead of one court ruling for all.
Should civil rights be defined differently for each state?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What exactly makes a cellphone (or any digital device) different than any other personal posession? Why did it take a special court ruling (and probably millions of dollars) to "clarify" this "issue"? Does the law (and the constitution) not already state that a person cannot be searched without due process?
Where in the world did this confusion come from?
because cops are assholes who think it's their job to take as much leeway they can get every time they can.
shouldn't be so, but it is. so when they started finding phones in peoples pockets(after going through the due process of determining that they looked like hoodlums) they took the opportunity to treat them as if they had just found everything in the phone as if it was on a printout and hell, since they now had the phone in custody why not try entrapping people based on the good faith they(the friends of the owner of the phone) had on the owner of the phone. because, as you know it's A WAR! a war on drugs and there's no rules on war(well, there isn't if you don't adhere to international conventions anyways). or terror. or for the good of the town. or whatever.
of course it's a generalization but can you blame people for starting to make such generalizations when they stem from real actions..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
To elaborate, the search incident to arrest is justified for the officer's safety. If you had a sealed letter on you, they could open it because there might be a shiv in the letter. In opening that letter, the contents enter plain view which makes them known to the police.
A cell phone is rightly exempt from this, because you can eliminate any possibility that the cell phone is a weapon without examining the data.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just FYI everyone, the Florida Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the Florida state constitution, and it's well-settled precedent that state constitutions can provide greater protection than the Federal constitution. The only way this case could have legitimately gotten to the U.S. Supreme Court is if the Florida Supreme Court found that a warrant WASN'T necessary. The defendant then could have asked the USCT to find that under the 4th and 14th amendment one was required.
To paraphrase the Simpsons:
Floridian: "Wow, Florida, this makes me feel...what's the opposite of ashamed?"
Florida: "Proud?"
Floridian: "Not that far from ashamed."
Florida: "Less ashamed?"
Floridian:"Yeah!"
Florida: "Awww, thanks."
So before the United States came into being there weren't any marriages!!! Hooray for the USA! ("Helping people 'hook-up' for over 200 years!!!)
... Or you are just plain wrong.
Here is a very important detail that just doesn't get noticed:
The US Constitution and Bill Of Rights DOES NOT GRANT ANY RIGHTS to the people. The people already had those rights. Those documents recognize those rights and protect those rights from intrusion by the government.
You might remember another document that said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. "
Yup, it is "self-evident" that these rights do not come from any gooberment proclamation. That fact that people seem to think that the government has rights over PEOPLE is one of the major problems that we have nowadays.
While marriage is not specifically mentioned, Article 4, section 1 states, "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." This is what allows a couple to be married in Kansas, then move to Ohio, and not have to remarry, or otherwise register their marriage. Many are arguing that states that fail to recognize the marriage of a gay couple in another state, are in violation of this rule.
Slavery was legal because some states said so; we had to fight a bloody war to make the point that it was not. States are not independent. Get over it. The state's rights thing has been invoked in slavery/gay-sex-crime/keep-the-former-slaves-out-of-our-schools/miscegenation/jesus-is-king/we-can-marry-kids case for over a hundred fifty years. No matter how many times the Confederacy trots this out, we will slap it down.
Marriage was, is, and will be a government-controlled institution. You aren't married by the power of Jesus, but by the power vested by the State in the justice of the peace, or minister, or druid. And there was marriage long before we invented gods.