Understanding the Court System - Essay Example

This paper endeavors to help in understanding the United States of America court system. To achieve this, the paper will discuss the case of Riley v. California heard in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court determination in this case considered two individual cases. Both cases involved cell phone searches during arrest without a warrant of search. One case involved David Leon Riley stopped in San Diego by a police officer in 2009 for having expired car registration tags (Harvard Law Review, 2014).

The police towed the vehicle and searched it. During the search, they discovered two handguns hidden under the boot of his car. The police seized his phone without warrant and searched it. The phone records showed that Riley was part of a gang known as the Lincoln Park gang the evidence from the phone also placed him at a crime scene three weeks before and his made the prosecution used this evidence to build a case of assault and attempted murder against Riley (Harvard Law Review, 2014). During the trial, the judge upheld that the evidence from Riley’s Smartphone was admissible because it fell under the exceptions provided by search-incident-to-arrest provisions.

The trial led to the conviction of Riley and the California court of appeal upheld this ruling (Harvard Law Review, 2014). The second case involved Brima Wurie arrested by a police officer who observed him participating in drug trade. During the arrest, the police officers confiscated two mobile phones from him (Harvard Law Review, 2014). After searching the call log, they determined the location of a caller and traced it to a location where they seized drugs, firearms and cash. The prosecution charged Wurie with drug and firearm possession.

The district court declined to declare the evidence from the mobile phone as inadmissible since the police acquired it without a warrant. However, the first circuit court overturned the decision by the district court citing that mobile