Florida Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant To Search Cell Phones 107
An anonymous reader writes "In a case stemming from a Jacksonville burglary, the Florida Supreme Court ruled 5-2 Thursday that police must get a search warrant before searching someone's cell phone. 'At this time, we cannot ignore that a significant portion of our population relies upon cell phones for email communications, text message information, scheduling, and banking,' read the majority opinion (PDF), authored by Justice Fred Lewis. 'The position of the dissent, which would permit the search here even though no issue existed with regard to officer safety or evidence preservation, is both contrary to, and the antithesis of, the fundamental protections against government intrusion guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.'"
A win for me! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
This will probably wind up in the Supreme Court eventually. I've been looking forward to that day.
Finally, something a Floridian can be proud about (Score:2, Interesting)
For once in a very long while, I feel slightly more proud to be a (native) Floridian!
Re: Good (Score:4, Interesting)
The Supreme court shouldn't even be allowed to hear this case( and wasn't the original intent of duty of the supreme court), nor the case from California regarding gay marriage nor any other law that the relevant states supreme court has already ruled on.
The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over federal matters. In the case of gay marriage, a federal statute called the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated. If you paid attention to the arguments, the justices questioned why the federal statute was necessary and whether it interfered with the states' right to define marriage. That was one part of the cases.
The second part is whether California can define marriage differently than other states. When it comes to legal differences between states, that is appropriate for SCOTUS.
There is a REASON why each state has a supreme court. 7 black robes in Washington should not be overturning/hearing on individual state laws/rulings unless the founding papers of this great land specifically gave the Supreme Court the power to do so.
There are federal implications in the case of gay marriage.
In this particular case, every state ought to have a ruling on this subject and be done with it instead of one court ruling for all.
Should civil rights be defined differently for each state?
Re:Why the difference? (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly makes a cellphone (or any digital device) different than any other personal posession? Why did it take a special court ruling (and probably millions of dollars) to "clarify" this "issue"? Does the law (and the constitution) not already state that a person cannot be searched without due process?
Where in the world did this confusion come from?
because cops are assholes who think it's their job to take as much leeway they can get every time they can.
shouldn't be so, but it is. so when they started finding phones in peoples pockets(after going through the due process of determining that they looked like hoodlums) they took the opportunity to treat them as if they had just found everything in the phone as if it was on a printout and hell, since they now had the phone in custody why not try entrapping people based on the good faith they(the friends of the owner of the phone) had on the owner of the phone. because, as you know it's A WAR! a war on drugs and there's no rules on war(well, there isn't if you don't adhere to international conventions anyways). or terror. or for the good of the town. or whatever.
of course it's a generalization but can you blame people for starting to make such generalizations when they stem from real actions..