Comment by eurleif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eurleif | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a ruling by a District Court. It could be appealed to the Circuit Court, and then to the Supreme Court.

In the federal court system, District Court decisions are not binding precedent. Circuit Court decisions bind the District Courts in their circuit, and Supreme Court decisions bind all lower courts.

This District Court is in the Second Circuit. Another District Court in the same Circuit made a similar decision in US v. Smith, but the Second Circuit Court has not yet ruled on warrantless border searches of cell phones. Several other Circuit Courts have, however, and their rulings were all opposite of this one: the First Circuit in Alasaad v. Mayorkas; the Fifth Circuit in US v. Castillo; the Seventh Circuit in US v. Wanjiku; and the Ninth Circuit in US v. Cano.

In short: this decision is not binding precedent, and a substantial amount of binding precedent exists in the opposite direction within other circuits.

(Credit for case law information to: https://www.wilmerhale.com/insights/client-alerts/20231115-o...)

Exactly this. (and for those unfamiliar with the terms, in federal courts "Circuit Courts" are the first level of appeals courts, which both sides have a right to be heard in, followed by the Supreme Court which is discretionary and only takes on big cases)

When there is a "circuit split" like this, with different appellate courts going in opposite directions you are almost 100% guaranteed SCOTUS has to step in to fix it.

I don't know the outcome of this, as I've not studied border searches in years, but while SCOTUS went in the favor of defendants on prior search cases (e.g. Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, cellphone searches on person during arrest; Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___ (2018), cellphone GPS logs from carrier; United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), GPS attached to car), the court has changed to the right, which generally (but not always) means less defendant-friendly, more government-friendly.

If I had to wager, SCOTUS will uphold warrantless border searches.

> the court has changed to the right, which generally (but not always) means less defendant-friendly, more government-friendly.

I would say the court is generally less defendant-friendly and less government-friendly.

Maybe in the narrow case where government = armed law enforcement, more government- friendly.

Maybe I should have said more prosecution/law-enforcement friendly, you're right.

With this SCOTUS it's really hard to tell... while they've mostly aligned to state actors, there are a few instances, in particular 2A cases where they've leaned into favoring civil liberties over state actors, so it could really go either way IMO.

That said, my own take has been for a while, that if I travel across borders that I'd specifically buy a burner phone and something cheap like a chromebook, possibly in the country being travelled to and expressly wiped clean before travel if taking said device across the border. Keeping some printed/written notes with contacts that I can establish on the other side.

It's kind of weird in that I don't think the above is excessively paranoid given how intrusive state actors can be, not just the US.

So does that mean they may not want to appeal it at all to avoid a ruling in a higher court?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com