The search warrant for defendant’s CSLI was for 4 days before a murder and 2 weeks after. He pleads overbreadth. The warrant is particular as to the subject matter, just the time is excessive. Thus, it does not permit a “rummaging,” but it needs to be narrowed. The court declines to suppress all of it and agrees with the state that 24 hours after the murder is not excessive. State v. Waters, 2020 Del. Super. LEXIS 61 (Jan. 30, 2020):
We have seen above that the warrant in this case was supported by probable cause to believe that the phone in question was in the Defendant’s possession on the night of the murder and its cell site information may offer up evidence of the Defendant’s whereabouts at the time of the crime. But the warrant and affidavit fail to offer probable cause as to what evidence, if any, might be gleaned from evidence of the phone’s location 4 days before and 2 weeks after the murder and it thus authorizes the seizure of more cell site location information than is supported by probable cause. Thus, it is an overly broad warrant. But because it is particular in that it seeks only cell site location information and only over a specific period of time and does not authorize a “general rummaging” through all data on a cell phone, it cannot be characterized as a general warrant and suppression of all of its fruits cannot be the appropriate remedy.
When a warrant is broader than the probable cause that supports it, for example in its temporal limitations, the Court may limit the scope of permissible evidence to that for which probable cause is present in the warrant.
The warrant did not explain why cell site location information was needed in this case and it is only by inference that the Court believes the location information may help to determine whether the Defendant (or at least his cell phone) was present at the date and time of the crime. But what, if any, further inference can be made — that is, what expanded window of time logically flows from the affidavit of probable cause — is sufficiently ambiguous that the Court requested further briefing from the parties.
Counsel for Defendant has responded that the probable cause demonstrates that the HSCLI for the location of the phone at the exact moment the offenses occurred is all that the warrant establishes. The State points to the affiant’s declaration that it was believed that the Defendant came to the victim’s residence in the “late afternoon” on the day before the homicide, “casing” the spot to which they would return after midnight. The State believes “late afternoon” can fairly be put at 3:30 pm and the Court agrees.
As to the end point, the State seeks to terminate the HSCLI 24 hours after the crime. Although the justification for this is a bit skimpier than it is for the starting point, the basis for a finding of probable cause that the HSCLI will yield evidence of a crime presumes that the HSCLI will be probative of the whereabouts of the Defendant. Demonstrating the whereabouts of the Defendant in the hours after the murder is certainly probative of whether he stayed within range of the cell tower for hours after the homicide — demonstrating that he remained within the locale of the crime scene or departed shortly thereafter. The Court finds that the HSCLI for the 24 hours after the crime is a reasonable window within the probable cause laid out in the warrant.
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)