David Riley Case

A man named David Riley was arrested after a traffic stop in California. The police later searched Riley’s car and found several guns in the vehicle. The police then took his phone and with the information they found, were able to convict him of an unrelated shooting several weeks prior to the traffic stop. However, the police did not receive a warrant before looking through Riley’s phone. Some say that because the police were not granted a warrant they had violated the Fourth Amendment right that protects people from “unreasonable searches and seizures”. If the police did violate the Riley’s Fourth Amendment right, he should have never been charged with the arrest related with the shooting. Although many people agree that law enforcers should

For example, when Connie Debate was killed her husband had said that a masked intruder broke in and attacked her. But, when the police had checked the fitbit Connie was wearing, they had learned that she had walked 1,217 feet in the hour her husband said she was killed. Knowing the information they had just discovered, the police were able to figure out that it was actually Connie’s husband, Richard Debate, that had killed her. Another case in which using an electronic device has helped the police involved a man named Timothy Carpenter. When the FBI mapped Carpenter’s locations for the previous four months, they had found that he had used his phone within a kilometer or so if several crime scenes at the times of the crimes. Prosecutors were able to convict and sentence Carpenter to more than 116 years in a federal prison. So even though the police used electronic devices without a warrant, it helped the courts put an end to trying to solve these

Therefore, not violating the Fourth Amendment law. Information shared to the public or third parties is not exactly private. The United States Supreme Court, during the case of Smith v. Maryland, ruled that, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntary turns over to third parties.” Meaning that when a person makes a call or texts someone that information is not private due to the other people involved. But, in the more recent case of Zanders v. Indiana cops used Marcus Zanders’ cell site data without a warrant to trace his location during the time periods in which several armed robberies were committed. Zanders’ case went to the Supreme Court. The court had said, “ Zanders presumptively knew that his phone makes and receives calls by sending signals to towers, and that Sprint keeps records of these signals for business purposes like billing and tracking tower usage.” Because of these statements, the ruled that the Fourth Amendment offers them no protection. So while people say that when police look through a persons’ electronic device it is invading their privacy, anything stored on one of these devices is not private. Nor is it a search when the information is shared with third