Cell Phone Searches Headed to the Supreme Court?

In a post last week, I mentioned that it looks increasingly likely that Supreme Court will grant certiorari in a case considering cell phone searches. In this post, I’ll support that remark by describing two cases in which certiorari petitions have been filed and explaining why each is a strong candidate for Supreme Court review. (Remember that existing North Carolina case law tends to support searching an arrestee’s cell phone incident to the arrest, as I discussed here.) The First Circuit Case. The first case is United States v. Wurie, __ F.3d __, 2013 WL 2129119 (1st Cir. May 17, 2013). Wurie arose when a Boston officer arrested the defendant for a hand-to-hand drug sale. Shortly after the arrest, officers opened the defendant’s cell phone and reviewed the call log. They noted a phone number in the call log was listed as “my house,” and used an online directory to match the phone number with a physical address. That led the officers to search the residence, where they found drugs and a gun. The defendant was charged in federal court with drug and firearms offenses and moved to suppress, arguing that the officers were not entitled to search his cell phone incident to his arrest, and that the search of the residence was the fruit of that poisonous tree. The district court judge denied the motion, the defendant was convicted, and he appealed. The First Circuit reversed in a split decision, with two judges reasoning that “that the search-incident-to-arrest exception does [...]