Jan. 3 was the first business day of the new year. Longtime Chief Justice Ronald George had just retired. Jerry Brown was returning to the office he had left behind some 28 years earlier, succeeding perhaps the single biggest celebrity to hold an elected executive branch office since Ronald Reagan. All but one of the state's newly elected constitutional officials were busy being sworn in.
With the attention of virtually all media directed toward the change of power in Sacramento -- the Democrats took over not just the governor's office, but every major constitutional office in state government -- a divided California Supreme Court quietly issued a major decision that constituted a major defeat for notions of personal privacy amidst the proliferation of personal electronic devices, People v. Diaz, 11 C.D.O.S. 107.
The story began nearly four years earlier when, on an April afternoon in 2007, one Gregory Diaz purportedly drove a drug dealer to the scene of a drug transaction; the dealer, in the back of Diaz's car, engaged in the sale of Ecstasy to an informant as a Ventura County deputy sheriff listened in over electronic surveillance equipment. Upon completion of the controlled buy, the alleged drug dealer was arrested, as was Diaz as a co-conspirator.
Nothing thus far was anything but ordinary in the day-to-day enforcement of the laws proscribing the possession or distribution of controlled substances.
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Source: law.com
By: Jeffrey Hayden
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