United States Ninth Circuit
US v. Lustig, 14-50549
In a case in which an officer conducted warrantless searches, incident to arrest, of cell phones found in the defendant's pockets two years before the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant before they may search an arrestee's cell phone, the District Court's judgment is: 1) affirmed in part where binding precedent at the time of the searches provided a reasonable basis to believe the searches were constitutional, and that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule therefore applies to the evidence obtained from those searches; and 2) reversed in part where the government did not meet its burden of establishing harmless error as to the district court's concededly erroneous failure to suppress the fruit of searches of other cell phones found in the defendant's car.
Appellate Information
- Decided
- Published 2016/07/29
Judges
- FRIEDLAND
Court
- United States Ninth Circuit