The Drug War has truly been the biggest bridge from the days of the "Peace Officer" to the "Enforcer." Prohibition laws completely reshape the nature of the job. It is a routine exercise to perform searches to look for contraband. Now we can look forward to the days when it those road-side fishing expeditions include requests to look in your phone for Thought Crimes.
Supreme Court stands by a ruling on text messages
The Supreme Court case is Diaz v. California, No. 10-1231.
Supreme Court stands by a ruling on text messages
Text messages: The Supreme Court let stand a ruling that the police can search text messages from an arrested criminal suspect's cell phone without obtaining a warrant.
The justices refused to review the California Supreme Court ruling that upheld the search on the grounds that defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they are carrying when taken into custody.
The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal by Gregory Diaz, who was convicted on drug charges. His attorneys said Supreme Court intervention was needed to resolve differing lower court rulings on how to apply precedent to warrantless searches of cell phone data.
In 2007, Diaz was arrested, searched, and taken to a police station after driving a car in which his passenger sold six pills of the drug ecstasy during an undercover operation. A small amount of marijuana also was found in his pocket.
During a break in the interrogation, an officer looked at the text message folder and discovered a coded message that appeared to refer to the ecstasy sales. That was about 90 minutes after Diaz had been arrested.
The Supreme Court case is Diaz v. California, No. 10-1231.