Carpenter v. United States

Carpenter v. United States is a pending case before the United States Supreme Court and raises the question of whether the government violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution by accessing an individual’s historical cell phone locations records without a warrant. On June 5, 2017, the Court agreed to review this case when it granted Carpenter’s petition for writ of certiorari. This case is currently on the Court’s October 2017 term docket; however, the argument date is yet to be determined.^[1]

Background

The case is considered the most important Fourth Amendment case that the Supreme Court has heard in a generation.^[2]

The Fourth Amendment protects "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures[.]" The government may only violate these rights upon issuance of a warrant. The Fourth Amendment protections include the public’s content of their communications; however, federal courts have long recognized that the Fourth Amendment does not protect the public from allowing the government to obtain the information necessary to get communications from point A to point B. For example, the government can obtain from a letter or package without a warrant the sender, receiver, originating and delivery addresses, package size, and weight; however, the government must obtain a warrant before opening the package or letter to obtain its contents.^[3]

In 1979, the Supreme Court decided Smith v. Maryland which determined the rights of the people with regards to phone communications.^[4] The Court held in Smith that the government may not eavesdrop on a phone call, even a phone call placed from a public phone booth; however, the phone numbers the person dialed on his phone could be obtained without a warrant. Smith was a landmark decision by the Court and has guided the federal courts ever since on questions related to privacy and cell phones.^[5]

In 1986, the United States Congress passed the Stored Communications Act (codified at 18 U.S.C. Chapter 121 §§ 2701–2712) which governs the privacy of stored Internet communications in the United States. Section 2703 (18 U.S.C. § 2703) provides the rules that the government must follow to compel a third-party service provider to disclose "customer or subscriber" content and non-content information.

A 2013 study found that over 90% of Americans owned a cell phone.^[6] Whenever a cell phone sends or receives data, the cell phone’s service provider stores this information which includes the time of the data transmission and location of the cell phone during the transmission. Service providers retain cell-site records in the ordinary course of business for their own purposes, including to find weak spots in their cellular networks and to determine whether to charge customers roaming charges for particular calls.^[7]

In 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Riley v. California which held that the warrantless search and seizure of digital contents of a cell phone during an arrest is unconstitutional.^[8] In its decision, the Court recognized that the public’s adoption of cell phones, combined with their capacity to hold vast quantities of detailed personal information makes cell phones vastly different from ancestral, analog phones. ^[9]

In Carpenter, the government is expected to rely upon the Stored Communications Act and Smith v. Maryland to support its position that obtaining the service provider’s location information should not require a warrant because the information only reveals a cell phone’s routing data rather than the contents of communications on the cell phone. The attorneys for Carpenter are expected to rely on the Fourth Amendment and Riley v. California to argue that cell phones have become intertwined into the lives of American citizens and the vast data contained within a person’s phone potentially holds the sum of the individual’s private life, so the routing data contains much more than the “information necessary to get communications from point A to point B”.^[10]

Statement of the Case

Between December 2010 and March 2011, several individuals in the Detroit, Michigan area conspired and participated in armed robberies at RadioShack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio. Ironically, the items stolen during these armed robberies were cell phones. When the robbers entered the store, they brandished their guns, ordered customers and employees to the back of the store and told the employees to fill their bags with new smartphones.^[11]

In April 2011, four of the robbers were captured and arrested (Carpenter was not among this group of arrestees). One of those arrested confessed and turned over his phone so FBI agents could review the calls made from his phone around the time of the robberies. Soon afterwards, a magistrate judge, in accordance with the Stored Communications Act, granted the FBI’s request to obtain "transactional records" from various wireless carriers for 16 different phone numbers for "[a]ll subscriber information, toll records and call detail records including listed and unlisted numbers dialed or otherwise transmitted to and from [the] target telephones […] as well as cell site information for the target telephones at call origination and at call termination for incoming and outgoing calls[.]" The order granted by the magistrate judge was not a warrant, which requires probable cause. The 16 different phone numbers called or received by the confessed robber around the time of the robberies was not sufficient evidence to establish probable cause; however, it was sufficient evidence under the Stored Communications Act which only requires “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."^[12]

From the historical cell-site records, the government was able to determine that Carpenter’s cell phone communicated with cell towers at the time and within a two-mile radius of four robberies. Carpenter was later charged and arrested and eventually convicted by a jury with several counts of aiding and abetting robbery that affected interstate commerce, and aiding and abetting the use or carriage of a firearm during a federal crime of violence. Carpenter was sentenced by Judge Sean Cox of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to 1,395 months, or 116.25 years, in federal prison.^[13]

United States v. Carpenter
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
Full case name	United States of America v. Timothy Ivory Carpenter (14-1572); Timothy Michael Sanders (14-1805)
Argued	October 14 2015
Decided	April 13 2016
Citation(s)	819 F.3d 880 (6th Cir. 2016)
Case history
Prior action(s)	2:12-cr-20218
Holding
The government's collection of a service provider’s business records does not constitute a Fourth Amendment “search” and therefore does not require a warrant
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Ralph B. Guy Jr., Raymond Kethledge, Jane Branstetter Stranch
Case opinions
Majority	Kethledge, joined by Guy
Dissent	Stranch

Sixth Circuit Decision

Carpenter appealed his conviction and sentence to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The case was argued before a three-judge panel on October 14, 2015. On April 13, 2016 Judge Raymond Kethledge delivered the opinion of the Court, affirming Carpenter’s conviction and sentence.^[14]

The Sixth Circuit relied on the Supreme Court’s guidance from the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland to clarify that only the content of a person’s communication is protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Court explained that “cell-site data — like mailing addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses — are information that facilitate personal communications, rather than part of the content of those communications themselves." Furthermore, the Court determined that the government did not obtain information from Carpenter, but from service provider’s business records. Thus, the government's collection of the service provider’s business records did not constitute a “search” of Carpenter under the Fourth Amendment and therefore it did not require a warrant.^[15]

Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch dissented from the majority’s conclusion that the collection of the service provider’s business records did not constitute a search. In her dissent, Judge Stranch states, “this case involves tracking physical location through cell towers and a personal phone, a device routinely carried on the individual's person; it also involves the compelled provision of records that reflect such tracking. In light of the personal tracking concerns articulated in our precedent, I am not convinced that the situation before us can be addressed appropriately with a test primarily used to obtain business records such as credit card purchases — records that do not necessarily reflect personal location. And it seems to me that the business records test is ill suited to address the issues regarding personal location that are before us.”^[16]

Supreme Court grants review

Carpenter petitioned for a writ of certiorari on September 26, 2016.^[17] On October 28, 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Carpenter.^[18] Also on October 28, 2016, the Cato Institute filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Carpenter.^[19] The government responded with their brief in opposition on January 27, 2017.^[20] Carpenter filed his reply brief on February 10, 2017.^[21] On June 5, 2017, the Supreme Court granted the petition.^[22] The case is set to be heard during the October 2017 term; however, the exact date of arguments before the Court has not been determined.^[23]

References

See Also

Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Stored Communications Act

Mobile phone tracking