If police pick up a suspect’s phone, power it on, call the number they think is associated with it, and watch the phone ring — have they searched it?
Under federal constitutional law, the answer has been yes since June 2014. A unanimous United States Supreme Court said so, plainly and categorically, in Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014). The Pennsylvania Superior Court said so again in Commonwealth v. Hunter, 2026 PA Super 48, decided just this week — albeit in the unfortunate context of a PCRA petition filed by a man already serving life in prison.
The lesson from Hunter is one that every criminal defense practitioner needs to internalize: Riley wasn’t a close call, it wasn’t limited to full forensic extractions, and it required suppression of far more evidence than many lawyers recognized at the time.
What Riley Actually Said
Before getting to Hunter, some background on Riley is worth the time. Prior to 2014, courts generally treated cell phones like any other item found on an arrested person. Under a doctrine developed in earlier Supreme Court cases, police could search objects “incident to arrest” — meaning without a warrant — to protect officer safety and prevent the destruction of evidence. Courts extended that logic to cell phones, reasoning that a phone was just another item on a person’s body.
Riley rejected that reasoning, unanimously. The Court held that the rationales supporting warrantless searches of physical objects — officer safety concerns, evidence destruction — simply don’t apply to the digital data on a phone. A phone can’t be used as a weapon. And once it’s in police custody, there’s no meaningful risk the arrested person will delete anything.
What the Court recognized instead is that a modern cell phone is something categorically different. It holds, in digital form, information more personal and more comprehensive than anything found in a person’s home. The Court quoted an old federal judge who once observed it was “a totally different thing to search a man’s pockets” versus “ransacking his house.” Then it made the point: if the pockets contain a phone, that distinction has collapsed. A phone search, the Court said, would typically expose more to the government than the most thorough search of a house.
The rule Riley announced was categorical. Not case-by-case. Not “minimally invasive searches are okay.” The answer the Court gave to what police must do before searching a seized cell phone was, in the Court’s own words: “get a warrant.”
Critically, Riley also specifically rejected the argument that police should be allowed to turn on a phone just to learn its number — the very thing that happened in Hunter.
What Police Did in This Case
Here are the relevant facts. State police were investigating a robbery and murder committed in December 2015. During their investigation, they identified a phone number they believed belonged to the defendant, Antoine Hunter. When Hunter was arrested in Maryland, he had a white iPhone on him. At that point, police had the phone and the number. The question was whether they were connected.
Maryland State Police, at Pennsylvania State Police’s direction, powered on the iPhone and called the suspected number. The iPhone rang. That was the confirmation: this was Hunter’s phone. Police then used that confirmation in their warrant application, obtained a warrant based on it, and performed a full forensic extraction of the phone’s contents.
What came out of that extraction was substantial. Text messages showed the phone’s user employing the same slang Hunter used in his police interview — specific, idiosyncratic words — suggesting Hunter was the one texting from the phone at the time of the robbery. Texts with co-defendant Reed established their close relationship and, the Commonwealth argued, their involvement in planning the crime together. Photographs from the phone showed Hunter and Reed together, and one showed Reed holding an assault rifle. And then there were the rap lyrics — found in the phone’s Notes application, written eleven days after the murder — which the trooper read to the jury in their entirety and described as “autobiographical.”
Why Powering On the Phone Was a Search
Trial counsel never moved to suppress any of this. At his PCRA evidentiary hearing years later, he acknowledged that cell phone evidence was “the crux of how [Hunter] was convicted.” He agreed that if he could have excluded it, he would have tried. But when asked whether he considered filing a suppression motion based on police powering on the phone and calling it, his answer was essentially: I don’t recall what the law was in 2015.
That answer, honest as it was, illustrated the problem.
Riley was decided in June 2014. Hunter’s trial was in September 2017. The Pennsylvania Superior Court had applied Rileyin Commonwealth v. Stem, 96 A.3d 407 (Pa. Super. 2014), just weeks after Riley came down. The law was not in flux. It was settled.
The PCRA court below tried to thread a needle: it acknowledged Riley‘s categorical rule, but concluded that a 2018 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision, Commonwealth v. Fulton, 179 A.3d 475 (Pa. 2018), was what first made clear that powering on a phone to confirm its number was a warrant-required search. Because Fulton came after trial, the lower court reasoned, counsel couldn’t be faulted for missing it.
The Superior Court disagreed, and I think correctly so. Fulton didn’t create new law — it applied law Riley had already established. And Riley itself had addressed the exact argument the Commonwealth tried to make here: that police should be allowed to turn on a phone to learn its number, just as they might open a pocket diary to copy an address. The Supreme Court in Riley explicitly rejected that approach. Turning on the phone to confirm the number was a search, under law that existed well before Hunter’s trial.
The Warrant Fell with the Search
The analysis didn’t stop at the initial warrantless action, though. Once the court determined that powering on the phone and confirming the number was an unconstitutional search, it had to ask whether the warrant that followed was tainted by it.
The answer was yes. The warrant application described the item to be searched as the white iPhone “confirmed to be associated with” the suspected number — that confirmation was the unconstitutional search. The affidavit of probable cause to search the iPhone entirely depended on information tied to that number. Strip out the tainted confirmation, and the affidavit had no basis to search the iPhone at all. Everything the warrant produced — the text messages, the photographs, the rap lyrics — was fruit of the poisonous tree.
The Identification Evidence Wasn’t Enough to Carry the Case Alone
The reason this matters — the reason trial counsel’s failure to suppress was prejudicial enough to warrant a new trial — is what the evidence looked like without the iPhone.
Of the six witnesses with firsthand knowledge of the robbery, only one, Calloway, unequivocally identified Hunter at trial. And Calloway had problems. He initially denied involvement. He then gave a version of events that didn’t mention Hunter. He sent Hunter a note in jail after the preliminary hearing complaining that he’d expected a plea deal in exchange for his testimony and hadn’t gotten one. His account of who wore gold shoes — a distinctive detail — shifted between witnesses and statements.
The two most independent witnesses, the victim’s fiancée and her son, did not identify Hunter at all. They identified someone else — a co-defendant named Swindell — as the second intruder. Swindell himself denied any knowledge of Hunter and testified Hunter wasn’t involved.
The lead investigator, Trooper Baney, acknowledged on the stand that there was no physical evidence linking Hunter to the crime scene. He agreed that, apart from the cell phone evidence, only the co-defendants’ identifications placed Hunter there. He agreed all four cooperating witnesses had lied to police and lied at trial. He acknowledged that Carbaugh and the victim’s son — who he agreed were not liars — both testified Hunter was not one of the men who entered the house.
The Superior Court was direct: the Commonwealth proved that whoever used the suspected phone was probably involved in the robbery. What it had not proven without the iPhone was that Hunter was that person. The phone evidence was the bridge between the suspected number and the man sitting at the defense table. Remove it, and that bridge is gone.
What Practitioners Should Take From This
Hunter is a reminder that Riley announced a broad, categorical rule in 2014, and courts have consistently declined to carve out exceptions for what might seem like minimal or preliminary intrusions. Powering on a phone is a search. Calling a number to make a phone ring is a search. Navigating menus to find a phone’s assigned number is a search. These are not close calls under the law as it has existed for over a decade.
When suppression is worth pursuing, pursue it. If you’re not sure, read Riley, read Fulton, and then read Hunter.
Hunter also illustrates something worth noting about PCRA practice generally. PCRA ineffectiveness claims are harder to win than preserved trial errors — the petitioner has to show not just that a motion would have succeeded, but that there was no reasonable strategic basis for not filing it, and that the outcome would probably have been different. Huntersatisfied all three. The motion would have succeeded because the law required it. There was no strategy in not filing it — counsel simply didn’t recall the legal landscape. And the case against Hunter without the phone was shaky enough that the court found a reasonable probability of a different result.
That’s a complete sweep of an ineffectiveness claim. They don’t come along often. This one should have been avoided entirely.