Almost everyone owns a cellphone, but that doesn’t give police a free pass to search for them, the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled Friday.

In its opinion, the court said the fact that most people carry cellphones “was not enough” to justify a warrant allowing police to search a suspect’s home in hopes of finding one. The court vacated Ezra Griffith’s conviction for illegally possessing a firearm on the grounds that the illegal gun police found in his girlfriend’s home should have been suppressed at trial due to an invalid warrant. The court ruled for Griffith 2-1, with Judge Janice Rogers Brown dissenting.

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David Sklansky, former federal prosecutor and criminal law professor at Stanford Law School, said the decision is part of a “broader phenomenon” in which courts are “struggling” to apply the Fourth Amendment in cases dealing with cellphones, computers and other devices in the internet age.

He said the opinion essentially equates the warrant at issue to a “general warrant,” a British practice that gave the government power to conduct sweeping, broad searches. It was this type of warrant that the framers of the Constitution sought to avoid with the Fourth Amendment, Sklansky explained.