Ask yourself: Do you think it was OK for the police to search the contents of Nix's phone without a warrant?
It's a complicated issue. We have rules against warrantless searches for good reason. On the other hand, law enforcement doesn't want to lose the ability to do everything it can to catch people they think are criminals.
Here's the legal issue at the heart of the case, which will be argued before the Oregon Supreme Court next week. We all know that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects everyone from "unreasonable" search and seizure. Since the 18th century, though, many cases have touched on how to define what is and is not unreasonable.
Under English common law, it was generally considered reasonable for the police to search you while you were being arrested. It became known as the "search incident to arrest exception" and has been around in American law for well over 100 years. The big change to the exception came in the 1969 case
Chimel vs. California, which laid out a key exception to the exception. Namely, if a suspect was arrested in his home, the police couldn't search his whole house. As Wikipedia summarizes it, the police could only search, "the area within the immediate control of the suspect," or as James Nix's attorney Bronson James more colorfully put it, there is a "wingspan rule." If you can reach it, the cops can search it.
Since then, there have been a variety of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions as courts try to grapple with the definition of "unreasonable." Courts have said that some types of objects near you are searchable -- purses, backpacks, diaries, etc. -- but that others might not be, like, say, a trunk.
Cellphones, indeed all digital devices, complicate the whole idea. Defense attorney James argued in a brief he filed this month that cellphones, as receptacles of bits, needed protections that objects made of atoms simply did not.
Framing the search incident to arrest doctrine in terms of purses and backpacks no longer works. ... Such a container is constrained by its physicality. It can hold only so much. It is finite. And as such, the privacy intrusion in searching a physical container is also finite.
But [cellphones and other devices] are not containers so much as portals. They themselves hold a vast amount of information, but also hold access to cloud information. They can hold anything, and are infinite. And, correspondingly, the privacy invasion of a full search of their contents is potentially infinite.
But the Oregon Appllate Court didn't agree. They argued that there really wasn't anything so novel about "cellular telephones" and that old analogies worked just fine.
"The premise of defendant's arguments is that cellular telephones are so special, indeed unique, in their character and capacity that they must be treated differently than other receptacles of possible evidence of crimes -- including, for example, 'day-timers,' calendars, address books, letters and even diaries -- in a defendant's possession at the time of arrest," the court wrote. "Ultimately, on a fully developed record, there could be some merit to that claim. But, even in this Wi-Fi age, it is hardly a self-evident-much less judicially noticeable-proposition, factually or legally."