January 3, 2011) was a Supreme Court of California case, which held that police are not required to obtain a warrant to search information contained within a cell phone in a lawful arrest.

[1] In a sting operation conducted by local police, the defendant, Gregory Diaz, was arrested for the sale of the illicit drug ecstasy and his cellphone, containing incriminating evidence, was seized and searched without a warrant.

[2] In 2014, the United States Supreme Court overruled that position in Riley v. California and held that without a warrant, police may not search the digital information on a cellphone that has been seized incident to arrest.

[2] In trial court proceedings, Diaz filed a motion to suppress the evidence found on his cell phone, citing Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

The court then proceeded to apply United States v. Edwards to hold that the search was valid although it had occurred 90 minutes after the arrest.

Kennard noted that in its earlier rulings surrounding the doctrine of search incident to arrest, the Supreme Court probably did not have cellphones in mind because Robinson, Edwards, and Chadwick were decided in an era before mobile communications.

"[2] Werdegar argued when Robinson and Edwards were decided, the Supreme Court did not have enough information about cellphones to establish a precedent for their search.

In allowing such broad seizures, Werdegar worried that the ruling would potentially give police a "carte blanche" and the legal right to search and seize any article or object belonging to an arrestee incident to arrest.

For the purposes of applying the past precedents of Robinson and Chadwick, the court continued, Diaz's cellphone is a container like any other.

[5] In a somewhat-similar federal case, United States v. Flores-Lopez, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on February 29, 2012, upheld the warrantless search of a cellphone upon arrest by a reasoning similar to Diaz.

[6] Jay Leiderman, Diaz's attorney who originally filed the motion to suppress at trial, called the court decision "weak" and a "scary one" because it relies on older US Supreme Court cases that have not kept up with today's modern technology in which cellphones and smartphones can hold tens of thousands of pieces of information: "This type of thing opens up the doors for Big Brother to come flying in.