Page 28 - 2019 A Police Officers Guide

telephone[ ] at call origination and at call termination for incoming and outgoing calls” during
the four-month period when the string of robberies occurred. Altogether the Government
obtained 12,898 location points cataloging Carpenter’s movements—an average of 101 data
points per day.

Carpenter was charged with six counts of robbery … Prior to trial, Carpenter moved to
suppress the cell-site data provided by the wireless carriers. He argued that the Government’s
seizure of the records violated the Fourth Amendment because they had been obtained without a
warrant supported by probable cause. The District Court denied the motion.

The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed. The court held that Carpenter
lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location information collected by the FBI
because he had shared that information with his wireless carriers. Given that cell phone users
voluntarily convey cell-site data to their carriers as “a means of establishing communication,” the
court concluded that the resulting business records are not entitled to Fourth Amendment
protection.

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 “basic purpose of
this Amendment,” our cases have recognized, “is to safeguard the privacy and security of
individuals against arbitrary invasions by governmental officials.” The Founding generation
crafted the Fourth Amendment as a “response to the reviled ‘general warrants’ and ‘writs of
assistance’ of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an
unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity.” For much of our history, Fourth
Amendment search doctrine was “tied to common-law trespass” and focused on whether the
Government “obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area.”
More recently, the Court has recognized that “property rights are not the sole measure of Fourth
Amendment violations.” Soldal v. Cook County, 506 U. S. 56, 64 (1992). In Katz v. United
States, 389 U. S. 347, 351 (1967),we established that “the Fourth Amendment protects people,
not places,” and expanded our conception of the Amendment to protect certain expectations of
privacy as well. When an individual “seeks to preserve something as private,” and his
expectation of privacy is “one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable,” we have held
that official intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search and requires a
warrant supported by probable cause.

1
JUSTICE KENNEDY believes that there is such a rubric—the “property-based concepts” that
Katz purported to move beyond. Post, at 3 (dissenting opinion). But while property rights are
often informative, our cases by no means suggest that such an interest is “fundamental” or
“dispositive” in determining which expectations of privacy are legitimate. Post, at 8–9. JUSTICE
THOMAS (and to a large extent JUSTICE GORSUCH) would have us abandon Katz and return
to an exclusively property-based approach. Post, at 1–2, 17–21 (THOMAS J., dissenting); post,
at 6–9 (GORSUCH, J., dissenting). Katz of course “discredited” the “premise that property

A Peace Officer’s Guide to Texas Law 20 2019 Edition