Case Alert: Even if it May Not Be Technically Required, You May Want to Get a Warrant When Searching a Cellphone

By Robert Phillips
Deputy District Attorney (Ret)

Legal Concepts 

• The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA)
• Warrantless consent searches of a cellphone
• The Fourth Amendment’s good faith exception as it applies to CalECPA

Rule: An officer’s good faith belief that a decedent’s mother was authorized to give consent to search her dead son’s cellphone precludes the suppression of the resulting evidence in violation of California’s Electronic Communications Privacy Act’s requirement pursuant to P.C. § 1456.1(c)(1) that a search warrant be obtained.

One-Minute Summary: A subject namedTyrone Lampley was found shot to death near and immediately after an armed robbery of marijuana and money. Officers recovered a cellphone from Lampley’s body. Lampley’s mother, as his next of kin, was asked for consent to search her son’s cellphone. With her consent, a warrantless search of the phone eventually led to the arrest of defendants  Edward Lee Allen Jr. and Milo William Anderson. After the defendants’ motion to suppress evidence obtained from the cellphone was denied by both the preliminary hearing magistrate and later the trial court judge, the defendants pled guilty and were sentenced to prison. On appeal, the court rejected the defendants’ argument that the warrant requirement of California’s Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA) had been violated, which would have required the suppression of the information obtained from Lampley’s phone. Declining to decide whether Lampley’s mother qualified as an “authorized possessor” of her deceased son’s phone who, pursuant to CalECPA, could lawfully give consent to search the phone, the court instead determined that the officers could in good faith assume that she was. As such, the good faith exception, as it applies to Fourth Amendment violations, was held to also apply to alleged violations of CalECPA. The defendants’ motions to suppress were therefore held to have been properly denied.

DETAILED CASE REVIEW AND LEGAL ANALYSIS:  

Facts: Jacob Cabral grew and sold marijuana, conducting much of his ....