State of Washington v. Samalia: Cell-phones and the Abandonment Doctrine
In State v. Samalia the Washington State Supreme Court addressed whether a motorist who fled a stolen vehicle and left his cell phone inside the vehicle had “abandoned” the property and thereby surrendered any privacy interest he had in the phone. This case is one of many that are sure to make their way to the Supreme Court in coming years, in which new technology challenges old ways of thinking about the search and seizure of property taken from an accused.
Mr. Samalia argued that, absent a valid exception to art. I, § 7 of the Washington State Constitution, which guarantees that “no person shall be disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of law,” the evidence gathered from the police search of his cell-phone should be suppressed. The trial court denied Samalia’s motion on the basis that, under the abandonment doctrine, Mr. Samalia voluntarily relinquished any privacy interest in the cell-phone and its data when he left it in the stolen vehicle and fled. He was eventually found guilty of possession of a stolen vehicle and the Court of Appeals Division Three affirmed Samalia’s conviction stating that the abandonment doctrine applied.
The majority opinion concluded that cell-phones and the data contained therein certainly constitute “private affairs” because of the sheer amount of private information that they contain combined with the fact that the court has historically guarded those same types of information for that reason. Since Samalia’s phone remained in the vehicle at the time he abandoned it, he made no apparent attempt to recover his phone, and the supposed “abandonment” took place during an attempt to evade police, the Court found that the voluntary abandonment doctrine applied and the warrantless seizure of Samalia’s phone and subsequent search of its data were justified.
The dissent begged to differ, not on whether Samalia voluntarily abandoned his cell-phone, it is clear that he did, but on whether cell-phones, due to their unique capacity to contain intimate and excruciating detail about every facet of their owners’ lives, should have heightened protection from the common law exceptions to being searched or seized without a warrant.
In a very forward-thinking dissent, Justice Yu explained that due to the nature of cell-phones today and how their technology is continuously evolving, the Court should err on the side of caution when applying the abandonment doctrine or any other common law exception to the 4th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has held that when the State tries to apply the “search incident to arrest” exception, the information contained in cell-phones is certainly distinguishable from other personal affects. Leaning heavily upon the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Riley v California, Justice Yu explains that because the highest court in the land has exempted cell-phones from being subjected to warrantless searches, so should this court. She also cites other cases where Division II and the US Supreme Court have taken into consideration the evolution of technology and its impact on the practicalities of everyday life when departing from common law tradition. It is also important to recognize that upon abandonment, the information that law enforcement may wish to examine does not vanish and may not be affected at all, and neither does the abandoning party’s privacy interest in that information.
The dissent distinguished a case cited by the majority in which law enforcement’s examination of a bottle of whiskey that was dropped by the defendant was deemed lawful, by observing that the governmental intrusion occurred at the point of examination. Cell phones are clearly different from everyday objects because what is important about them cannot be discerned just by looking at them, but by unlocking their contents, and that is why the abandonment doctrine cannot (according to the dissent) apply to the information on a cell phone. To quote the Amicus brief in this case that was submitted by the ACLU of Washington: “It would be patently absurd to suggest that abandonment of a traditional key means that warrantless access is allowed to the house it locks; the same must be true of digital keys to electronic information.”
