Page 40 - TPA Journal July August 2018

Joe C. Tooley, Legal Digest Editor
Joe C. Tooley, Attorneys & Counselors, Rockwall, Texas
www.TooleyLaw.com 972-722-1058

TEXAS POLICE ASSOCIATION

LEGAL DIGEST

July/August 2018

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It is the goal of this submission to extract those portions of relevant appellate
opinions or the syllabus of the legal reporter which bear directly upon law enforcement methods
and provide guidance for officers on an operational level. Much of the information pertaining to
these cases is lifted verbatim from the court opinion or syllabus with independent analysis inserted
as appropriate. Due to clarity for training purposes, the distinction between quotes from the
opinions and inserted analysis is not always identified and legal citations within the opinion are
often omitted. Emphasis is placed upon reported decisions from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

SEARCH & SEIZURE – WARRANT REQUIRED information of the sort at issue here. While
FOR CELL TOWER DATA – U.S. SUPREME carriers have long retained CSLI for the start
COURT and end of incoming calls, in recent years
[Ed. Note: This was a 5 – 4 decision] phone companies have also collected location
infor mation from the transmission of text

This case presents the question whether the messages and rou tine data connections.
Govern ment conducts a search under the Accordingly, modern cell phones generate
Fourth Amendment when it accesses historical increasingly vast amounts of increasingly
cell phone records that provide a precise CSLI.
comprehensive chronicle of the user’s past
movements. In 2011, police officers arrested four men
suspected of robbing a series of Radio Shack
Wireless carriers collect and store [cell-site and (ironically enough) T-Mobile stores in
location information ] CSLI for their own Detroit. One of the men confessed that, over
business purposes, including finding weak the previous four months, the group (along
spots in their network and applying “roaming” with a rotating cast of getaway drivers and
charges when another carrier routes data lookouts) had robbed nine different stores in
through their cell sites. In addition, wireless Michigan and Ohio. The suspect identified 15
carriers often sell aggregated location records accomplices who had participated in the heists
todata brokers, without individual identifying and gave the FBI some of their cell phone

36 www.texaspoliceassociation.com • 866-997-8282 Texas Police Journal