CA5: Search incident of defendant’s cell phone incident to arrest on a warrant was valid

Defendant’s cell phone was validly searched incident to his arrest under Fifth Circuit authority. United States v. Curtis, 635 F.3d 704 (5th Cir. 2011)*:

In United States v. Finley, we held that the police can search the contents of an arrestee’s cell phone incident to a valid arrest. In Finley, the police arrested the defendant after a reverse-sting drug sale. They searched his person following the arrest and seized a cell phone they found in his pocket. The police then transported the defendant to a different location for questioning. During the questioning, the arresting officer scrolled through the text messages on the defendant’s phone. The officer discovered some incriminating text messages that were admitted against the defendant at trial.12 We concluded that the search of the cell phone’s contents was incident to the defendant’s arrest and affirmed the decision not to suppress the text messages.13 The Fourth,14 Seventh,15 and Tenth16 Circuits have reached the same conclusion on similar facts.

12 Finley, 477 F.3d at 254.
13 Id. at 259—60.
14 United States v. Murphy, 552 F.3d 405, 410 (4th Cir.), cert. denied, 129 S. Ct. 2016, 173 L. Ed. 2d 1109 (2009); United States v. Young, 278 F. App’x 242, 245 (4th Cir. 2008) (per curiam) (unpublished).
15 United States v. Pineda-Areola, 372 F. App’x 661, 663 (7th Cir. 2010) (unpublished); see also United States v. Ortiz, 84 F.3d 977, 984 (7th Cir. 1996).
16 Silvan W. v. Briggs, 309 F. App’x 216, 225 (10th Cir. 2009) (unpublished).

Finley forecloses Curtis’s argument that the district court should have suppressed the text messages that were recovered from his phone. Curtis concedes that he was arrested pursuant to a valid Texas arrest warrant and that Edwards recovered the phone from an area that was within Curtis’s reaching distance at the time he was arrested. It is also undisputed that Curtis was still being processed when Edwards scrolled through the text messages.