Court Rules Abandoned Cell Phone was…well…Abandoned

Posted Thursday, March 26, 2015 by Andrew Charles Huff

A cell phone left in an abandoned stolen vehicle by the fleeing suspect can be used for identification without a warrant. This month the Court of Appeals in State v. Sutlej Samalia-Division Three, held that once a cell phone has clearly been abandoned by the owner, they no longer have an “expectation of privacy” in the device and therefore, a search warrant was not needed to search its database for evidence.