First Amendment Lawyer Blog

California Governor Jerry Brown disappointed privacy advocates with his October 9 veto of a bill which would have required law enforcement officers to have a warrant before searching cell phones incident to an arrest.

The bill, Senate Bill 914, sailed through the Legislature with a 32-4 Senate vote and unanimous 70-0 support in the Assembly. It would have overturned a California Supreme Court decision, People v. Diaz(2011) 51 Cal. 4th 84, which held that a search of a defendant’s cell phone incident to an arrest was lawful, even without a warrant, because a cell phone is like an article of clothing.

Dissenting Justice Kathryn Werdegar argued that, “The potential intrusion on informational privacy involved in a police search of a person’s mobile phone, smartphone or handheld computer is unique among searches of an arrestee’s person and effects,” because a smartphone can contain hundreds of thousands of messages, photographs, videos, maps, contacts, financial records, memoranda and the like.

The Legislature agreed. SB 914 would have overturned the Diaz decision. The author, State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), said, “If you like to attend political rallies, parades, protests or sit-ins, you might want to consider leaving your cell phone at home in the event arrests are made. A recent California Supreme Court decision allows police to rummage through all of the private information on your smart phone as part of an arrest, including your text messages and e-mails.” He said the court’s decision raised many privacy concerns, and a bi-partisan majority of the Legislature agreed. Leno said cell phones “store a wealth of personal information,” and that accessing information on a cell phone is “fundamentally different than searching an arrested person’s wallet, cigarette pack or jeans pockets.”
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The Occupy movement is raising some thorny First Amendment issues.

Protesters have First Amendment rights to demonstrate and march, and they’ve raised important issues about the rising income inequality in this country.

On the other hand, governments traditionally have been able to impose so-called “time, place and manner” restrictions, so the issue becomes whether Occupy protesters have First Amendment rights to permanently occupy certain public places.

I had little sympathy for homeless people in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park who left syringes and human waste in the park and despoiled its natural beauty.

But I have more sympathy for those who’ve pitched tents in downtown spaces like San Francisco’s Harry Bridges Plaza and Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza. For one thing, there’s a clear speech message associated with their encampment. For another, they are occupying what seem like public spaces more suitable for public gatherings than enjoyment of natural beauty and the great outdoors.

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Is Mortal Kombat the highest form of free speech?

Maybe not. But it is protected by the First Amendment, according to a majority of the U. S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on June 27 in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association struck down a California law restricting the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. It makes for interesting reading, and it produced several different opinions. Justice Antonin Scalia — joined by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan — delivered a full-throated defense of violent video games, holding, “Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny.” He compared violent video games to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, where the wicked queen, as punishment for trying to poison Snow White, “fell dead on the floor,” and to Cinderella, where her evil stepsisters “have their eyes pecked out by doves.”

The California law was dead on arrival, the Court said, because the state “acknowledges that it cannot show a direct causal link between violent video games and harm to minors.”

Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts weren’t so sure. Alito wrote, “In the view of the Court, all those concerned about the effects of violent video games — federal and state legislators, educators, social scientists, and parents — are unduly fearful, for violent video games really present no serious problem. Spending hour upon hour controlling the actions of a character who guns down scores of innocent victims is not different in ‘kind’ from reading a description of violence in a work of literature. The Court is sure of this; I am not. There are reasons to suspect that the experience of playing violent video games just might be very different from reading a book, listening to the radio, or watching a movie or a television show.”
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The Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) stepped into a touchy First Amendment issue when it shut off cell-phone service this summer in response to protests over a police action.

The decision sparked protests from First Amendment advocates and even criticism from BART board members who thought the agency overreacted to protesters.

BART argues that it has no obligation to provide cell-phone service at all in its underground tube and tunnels. But the protesters argued, with some justification, that once BART provides cell-phone access it shouldn’t cut it off to prevent protesters and riders from communicating and peacefully assembling.