The use of a cell site simulator to find defendant who was suspected of having taken his alleged murder victim’s cell phone was done in objective good faith because officers relied on an order to initiate the tracking. [Since Maryland recognizes traditional “standing” analysis, why didn’t they just say there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in tracking a stolen cell phone?] State v. Copes, 2017 Md. LEXIS 478 (July 28, 2017). First paragraph is a summary by the court; the rest is from the opinion:
Police officers applied for court authorization to use a cell site simulator and other techniques to locate a missing cell phone associated with a murder victim in the hope that the phone would lead them to the murderer. They obtained a court order, based in part on the procedure required for obtaining court authorization for a pen register under the Maryland Pen Register Statute, Maryland Code, Courts & Judicial Proceedings Article, §10-4B-01 et seq. Using the cell site simulator, the police succeeded in locating the cell phone, together with Respondent Robert L. Copes, Jr., and evidence linking him to the victim and the murder. The Circuit Court later concluded that the use of the cell site simulator violated the Fourth Amendment and suppressed the evidence. The Court of Appeals assumed, for the sake of argument, that use of a cell site simulator by law enforcement officers is a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. The Court concluded that, even if the court order under the Pen Register Statute fell short of a search warrant, the officers engaged in “objectively reasonable law enforcement activity” in obtaining the order and using the cell site simulator to locate the cell phone. Under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, the evidence would not be suppressed.
. . .
Advances in personal technology, like the cell phone, empower individual users but may also threaten personal privacy. When police make use of the features of that technology to solve crime, courts and lawyers sometimes struggle to devise ground rules that respect constitutional privacy protections. This case involves an example of the law’s effort to keep apace.
Detectives investigating the gruesome murder of a young homeless woman in Baltimore City determined that a cell phone associated with her — but not found with her body — was still in active use. Hoping to find the phone — and the murderer — they applied to the Circuit Court for authorization to use, among other techniques, a “cellular tracking device” to locate the phone. They presented a sworn application to the Circuit Court that summarized the investigation of the murder, information concerning the missing phone, and their purpose in attempting to find it, as well as a draft order that tracked the application in pertinent respects. They did so under an established procedure — approved by the State’s Attorney and the Police Department’s lawyer — that had been adapted from a statute for police use of devices that record the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls concerning a target phone. The court issued the order, finding that “probable cause exists” upon the basis of the application.
The detectives then employed a device known as a cell site simulator — basically, an undercover cell tower — which led them to the apartment of Respondent Robert L. Copes, where they found the phone, Mr. Copes, and evidence linking him to the victim and the murder.
After charges were filed, Mr. Copes asked the Circuit Court to suppress the evidence obtained as a result of the use of the cell site simulator. Despite finding that the detectives acted “in good faith” and had done “fine work,” the Circuit Court felt constrained by a recent decision of the Court of Special Appeals. It granted the motion on the ground that the use of the cell site simulator to locate the phone was a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment and that the court order did not function as a search warrant.
We hold that the evidence need not be suppressed. Regardless of whether use of a cell site simulator is a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment or whether the court order authorizing its use fell short of a search warrant, the detectives in this case acted in “objectively reasonable good faith.”
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)