Lamar Sequan Brown v. South Carolina

Fourth Amendment doctrine permits police to freely search ordinary objects deemed “abandoned.” No suspicion, or warrant, or exigency is required. But cell phones are not ordinary objects because of the trove of personal data they carry. Riley v. California, 134 S.Ct. 2473, 2489–91 (2014) (holding that cell phone data fundamentally differs from other contents of a person’s pocket, and thus requires a warrant to search it after an arrest). For this reason, Florida courts have correctly ruled that police must obtain a warrant before searching the data on a lost, passcode-protected cell phone. On the other hand, the South Carolina Supreme Court here treated a lost cell phone as no different than a wallet or overcoat. It upheld a warrantless search of the data on a lost, passcodeprotected cell phone. The question presented here is whether police must obtain a warrant before searching cell phone data on a lost but passcode-protected phone.