NC: CSLI violation was attenuated because it only helped locate him and then there was a SW in another state

Defendant’s offense was in 2005 and he was originally tried in 2011 and reversed that conviction. On retrial, he filed a motion to suppress a pen register used to locate him in Colorado. CSLI without a warrant was permitted in 2005, but here it dealt with realtime and future CSLI which was not at issue in Carpenter. The court approaches the issue as attenuation, and finds it. When defendant was located, he pulled a gun on the officers and then a search warrant was obtained that led to the evidence used here. The CSLI only helped find him. State v. Thomas, 2019 N.C. App. LEXIS 846 (Oct. 15, 2019).*

Defense counsel wasn’t ineffective for not challenging the search warrants for defendant’s electronic devices because there was probable cause for the warrants and he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address. “It can hardly be considered unreasonable for Otoupal’s lawyer to not pursue a course of action that would have failed. But even assuming counsel should have filed a motion to suppress, Otoupal’s objection fails because he cannot show prejudice.” Otoupal v. United States, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 177838 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 10, 2019).*