 Police recovered illegal narcotics from a vehicle and seized two phones from Griselle LaCosta-Franco after a stakeout in Philadelphia in 2025. They then obtained a warrant to search her devices, relying on generalized assertions in their affidavit that drug traffickers frequently use phones to communicate. PPSA is now telling the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals that the government cannot establish probable cause to search the contents of someone’s cellphone merely by observing that the person owns a smartphone – and that smartphones are likely to contain evidence of criminal activity. The Principle at Stake This case is now on appeal to the Third Circuit after a federal court in Pennsylvania suppressed the searches of Ms. LaCosta-Franco’s phones on constitutional grounds. After the government appealed, PPSA on Thursday filed an amicus brief demonstrating the weakness of the underlying rationale – or lack of one – for the searches. PPSA tells the Third Circuit that probable cause to believe that someone committed a crime – which certainly exists in this case – does not automatically establish probable cause to search every place or device associated with that person. The Fourth Amendment requires a factual nexus between the suspected offense and the particular place or thing to be searched. That principle is especially important for smartphones, which hold so much of our private information – call records, texts, images, and internet searches. Courts have properly upheld phone searches when officers observed a suspect using a phone during a crime, documented communications among conspirators, or connected a device to a controlled drug purchase. None of that was alleged in the officers’ affidavit to the court. More than 90 percent of American adults own a smartphone. Smartphone ownership therefore does nothing to distinguish a device containing evidence from the hundreds of millions that do not. Why Is this Important? The district court’s ruling is a significant extension of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Riley v. California, which invalidated the warrantless search of a suspect’s cellphone following an arrest. Riley recognized that mobile phones contain an “encyclopedic” record of a person’s life. Police officers are thus required to get a warrant before searching someone’s phone. This case represents the next step – making sure that such warrants are properly predicated. Americans would find their privacy rights at risk if warrants to search their devices became a rubber-stamp exercise. As PPSA’s brief explains, allowing boilerplate claims about ordinary smartphone use to supply probable cause would make every suspect’s phone searchable. PPSA told the court that “smartphone possession, standing alone, does virtually nothing to distinguish criminal from non-criminal activity or mark the phone as a place likely to contain evidence of criminal activity.” We urge the Third Circuit to affirm that such warrants must be supported by facts connecting a specific phone to a specific crime. This was important not just for one criminal defendant, but for all Americans who store – as the Supreme Court put it in Riley – the “privacies of life” on their phones. Comments are closed.
|
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed