Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog
A police officer just took my cellphone: Can he do that? The answer is, as it is with all things legal, it depends.
Cell phones seem to be in the news every day now. They have become such a part of the everyday fabric of the lives of the majority of people that we consider them indispensable, as they often contain so much of our personal information and lives. How could we possibly go for a day without them. For example, do you know by heart the telephone number of your spouse or partner or child? If you were arrested and your cellphone taken from you as part of the arrest, would you know by memory the cellphone number of your closest loved one to be able to call that person from the jail to be bailed out? (That is NOT a hypothetical scenario, Friends! It happens). Think also about the hot car death of 22 month old Cooper Harris in Cobb County last year. A search of Dad Justin Ross Harris’s cellphone revealed internet searches for death in a hot car and also revealed Mr. Harris had been texting sexually explicit messages that day to a minor. What appeared to be a tragic honest mistake of forgetting the child was in the car and leaving him in a hot car where he died turned into an arrest for intentional murder of the child, all because of what was found on the dad’s cellphone.
Just last month our very own Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a pair of child pornography defendants abandoned their rights to a phone after they lost it at a store and gave up attempts to retrieve it. United States v. Johnson, No. 14-12143, and United States v. Sparks, No. 14-12075 (11th Cir. Dec. 1, 2015).
