Is there a clear majority opinion, or were there a bunch of concurrences?
Further, our opinion does not consider other collection techniques involving foreign affairs or national security. Join CAC's Constitutional Progressives email list for updates on our work! The Supreme Court has handed down its long-awaited decision in Carpenter v. United States. The district court denied the motion to suppress, and the Sixth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v.United States 1 clearly illustrates that we have been trying to fit a square peg into a round hole for far too long.
Why is there?
Decided November 16, 1987. He is a former law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. There’s a clear majority. It should turn, instead, on whose property was searched. Okay, so what was the reasoning of the majority opinion? On Friday, June 22, the Supreme Court issued its much-anticipated opinion in Carpenter v. United States, holding that a warrant is required for police to access cell site location information from a cell phone company—the detailed geolocation information generated by a … drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent.”. Argued October 7, 1987. At the same time, this tool risks Government encroachment of the sort the Framers, "after consulting the lessons of history," drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. It was a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice Roberts joined by the four liberal-leaning Justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor). Or is short-term warrantless surveillance permitted? I have written about how the Supreme Court often engages in equilibrium-adjustment when new technology threatens the balance of government power. What other technology and its uses might also cross it?
8. The suspect forfeited his cell phone to FBIauthorities, who examined the phone's call records for additional information.
16–402 . When confronting new concerns wrought by digital technology, this Court has been careful not to uncritically extend existing precedents.
“The accuracy of CSLI is rapidly approaching GPS-level precision,” the chief justice predicts, and the Court has to adopt a rule in light of what the technology will look like then. In a footnote, he adds in response to a dissent that we "do not begin to claim all the answers today, and therefore decide no more than the case before us."
United States v. Carpenter, No.
For example, what is the scope of this reasonable expectation of privacy in the "whole" of physical movements? On one hand, the reasoning of the opinion is largely about tracking a person's physical location. Regular readers will recall the debate over the mosaic theory, by which perhaps short-term surveillance is not a search but long term surveillance is, on the thinking that long-term surveillance lets the government create a mosaic of a person's life. Ironically, the perpetrators were after cell phones. No.
Carpenter argues that the government’s acquisition of his historical cell site location data constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment because it violated the reasonable expectation of privacy that he had in that information. Indeed! Ironically, the perpetrators were after cell phones. The Supreme Court held that the government’s acquisition of Carpenter’s cell phone location records constituted a search, and that the government should have first obtained a warrant. In addition, Carpenter's view of Miller and Smith is narrower than the opinions in Miller and Smith suggest, Carpenter suggests that the third-party doctrine is less of the bright-line rule that the cases suggest and more of a fact-specific standard. The Jones concurrences were really light on that, and Carpenter doesn't do much beyond citing them for it: What is this doctrine and where did it come from? I'll do it in the form of a question-and-answer session, asking questions you may have and offering answers as best I can. Id.. .
16-402 (June 22, 2018), a closely watched criminal case addressing whether law enforcement officials can secure cell-site location information without … 12-20218, 2013 WL 6385838 (E.D.
This is one of the most interesting aspects of the opinion. 484 U.S. 19. Old rules don’t apply. Here's the paragraph: JUSTICE ALITO overlooks the critical issue.
But when the records are super private and pervasive, disclosure isn't enough to eliminate Fourth Amendment rights. Carpenter v. United States began in December of 2010, when a series of robberies hit Michigan and neighboring Ohio. . As Justice Frankfurter noted when considering new innovations in airplanes and radios, the Court must tread carefully in such cases, to ensure that we do not "embarrass the future."
Near the end, the chief justice adds a very interesting paragraph saying that the opinion is narrow. The court ruled for the government, concluding that Carpenter had no reasonable expectation of privacy in cell phone location records. As we explained, obtaining and examining Carpenter’s cell phone records was a “search” in any normal sense of the word, and it is a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The case came on a writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.. Legal scholars have highlighted the potential impact of this case on data privacy rights. 137 S. Ct. 2211, 198 L.Ed.2d 657 (2017).. .
But I digress.)
In his dissent, Justice Gorsuch suggests that this means that Smith and Miller are "on life support," but I don't see that in the majority. There's another revealing passage when the chief justice is responding to Justice Alito on what the standard should be for accessing the records, assuming that it is a search. Introduction. It lives, but there is an equilibrium-adjustment cap on it. One of the suspects told police that other men had assisted in the robberies. From those records, they were able to track Carpenter’s whereabouts over a four-month period.
. United States v. Carpenter, 819 F.3d 880, 885-886 (2016), reh’g en banc denied, June 29, 2016.. . On the other hand, there's lots of language in the opinion that cuts the other way. In response to the dissent’s pointing out the record, the chief justice says the court has to take into account where the technology is going.
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 473–474 (1928), Northwest Airlines, Inc. v. Minnesota, 322 U. S. 292, 300 (1944), Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights.
Carpenter v. United States. against unreasonable searches.” Indeed, although the Framers of the Fourth Amendment could not have anticipated cell-phone technology, they deliberately chose language that demonstrated their recognition of the dangers inherent in any state claim of unlimited authority to conduct searches for evidence of criminal activity.
But the court seems to be getting it mostly from Justice Alito's Jones concurrence, and the idea, as Alito wrote in Jones, that "society's expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual's car for a very long period.". Each of the four dissenters wrote their own dissents, which may explain why the opinion took so much time. United States v. Carpenter, 819 F.3d 880 (6th Cir. Under the SCA, telecommunication companies ma…
Carpenter moved to suppress the government's cell-site evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, arguing that the FBI needed a warrant based on probable cause to obtain the records.
We don't know.
He is a nationally recognized scholar of criminal procedure and computer crime law. Brief for Petitioner, Timothy Ivory Carpenter at 14–15. The opinion takes as a given that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the "whole" of your "physical movements."
That's not what the cases say; the cases say that the doctrine entirely eliminates an expectation of privacy. Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2223.. . It is absolute perfect surveillance, in the court’s vision, like a GPS device around a person’s ankle. The facts of Smith and Miller were on one side of the line, and seven days of this technology crossed over to the other side. After going through some legal analysis, the chief justice sort of stops and says (without using the label), but this is equilibrium-adjustment! In effect, disclosure is enough to eliminate privacy when the records disclosed only involve a normal amount of privacy. Syllabus. The case Carpenter v. United States surrounds a man who was identified as a suspect in a series of robberies. At the very least that is going to invite a boatload of litigation on how far this new reasoning goes. Its use of equilibrium-adjustment will open the door to lots of new arguments about other records that are also protected. 4. CAC filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of scholars of the history and original meaning of the Fourth Amendment, arguing that the government violated Carpenter’s Fourth Amendment right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. Carpenter v. United States was a case argued during the October 2017 term of the U.S. Supreme Court.Argument in the case was held on November 29, 2017. .
Part of the thinking here is an adoption of Carpenter's rhetoric in his brief that the third-party doctrine only "diminishes" an expectation of privacy. That was key to the Jones concurrences. Id. TIMOTHY IVORY CARPENTER, PETITIONER . 86-422. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES .
The old understanding was that the third-party doctrine is a bright-line rule: When you voluntarily disclose information to someone, whether to an undercover officer or a business you're working with, you don't have Fourth Amendment rights in the recipient's copy of that information. In April of 2011, police arrested four men in connection with a string of armed robberies of stores in Michigan and Ohio. Id. Instead of focusing on the facts of this case, the court seems more interested in where the technology is thought to be going.