Justice

Washington City Paper  -The [DC] Metropolitan Police Department has been illegally keeping the cellphones of people who were arrested during the August 2020 racial justice protests, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled on Friday.Six arrestees, including five protesters and one journalist, sued MPD after the department refused to return their cellphones until they went to court about a year after the arrests. The six people were released without criminal charges, and MPD never obtained warrants to search their phones. The ruling is a victory for Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Michael Perloff, interim legal director of the ACLU of D.C., tells the Post. The ACLU litigated the case. 

The ruling is a departure from most other appellate court decisions on the matter. “It is one thing not to have access to a cellphone while spending a night in jail,” Judge Gregory G. Katsas writes in the three-judge panel. “It is quite another not to have access to it for the following year.”