A federal appeals court ruled last week that law enforcement authorities did not overstep their bounds by accepting information from a carrier about the location of a robbery suspect’s cell phone.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the 2015 conviction of Lawrence Adkinson and his sentence for conspiracy to commit robbery, according to Indiana Lawyer.
Adkinson and others were charged and convicted of robbing, at gunpoint, approximately 100 cell phones from T-Mobile and Verizon stores in Indiana and Kentucky.
In response, T-Mobile took data, i.e., “tower dumps,” from cell sites nearest to the respective stores, to identify who may have been within close proximity of the crimes. They found that only one T-Mobile phone was near both robberies with Adkinson’s name on the account.
T-Mobile turned the information over to the FBI, which used the data to obtain a court order under the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2703, granting the FBI access to additional cell site data, the Lawyer reported.
Adkinson’s lawyers said the move violated their client’s Fourth Amendment rights but the argument was eventually overruled by the 7th Circuit Court, saying Adkinson consented to T-Mobile collecting and sharing his cell site information.
The court’s ruling stated: “First, T-Mobile is a private party, and Adkinson has not shown that it was the government’s agent…Second, regardless of agency, Adkinson’s Fourth Amendment rights were still not violated because Adkinson consented to T-Mobile collecting and sharing his cell-site information…Third, (Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)) itself does not help Adkinson,” the order said. “The case did not invalidate warrantless tower dumps which identified phones near one location (the victim stores) at one time (during the robberies) because the Supreme Court declined to rule that these dumps were searches requiring warrants.”
“Finally, even if Adkinson sought to challenge the cell-site location data that the government later collected through the order it obtained under the Stored Communications Act, the challenge would be meritless,” the court said. “Adkinson did not challenge the admission of such data below and cannot do so now.”
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February 22, 2019
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