Source: http://kansasfpd.blogspot.com/2018/06/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 20:55:37+00:00

Document:
Digital is different. Where do we go from here?
Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts doesn't like the idea of the government having easy access to five years' worth of his personal location data ("this newfound tracking capacity runs against everyone"---not just suspected criminals!). So we learned last week in Carpenter v. United States, which held that the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it accessed 127 days of Mr. Carpenter's cell site location information (CSLI) without a warrant.
This was a search because it invaded Mr. Carpenter's reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of his physical movements." Mr. Carpenter's expectation was reasonable despite the third-party doctrine (that is, despite the fact that he knowingly shared his location information with the phone company). The doctrine takes a pretty hard hit in this opinion, though it remains the law at least in some limited arenas for now.
"Before compelling a wireless carrier to turn over a subscriber's CSLI, the government's obligation is a familiar one---get a warrant."
That's all good news, but how far does it go? It's not easy to tell from the opinion. The majority emphasizes the "deeply revealing nature" of historical CSLI and explicitly says that its decision "is a narrow one." But there's plenty of food for thought in both the majority's opinion and Justice Gorsuch's dissent (Justice Gorsuch would scrap the Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy analysis, and suggests that our property interest in our digital information is sufficient to give it Fourth Amendment protection).
The Birmingham police were after a suspect. While wearing a partial face mask and presenting a note identifying himself as a bomb specialist carrying explosives, this suspect robbed a Walgreens pharmacy. And, according to the police’s theory, that same suspect carried out the exact same scenario at a Rite Aid pharmacy the next day.
The officers had little to go on. Two eye witnesses had identified an individual in a lineup, but police rejected that identification when they determined the individual was incarcerated at the time of the robberies.But after Crime Stoppers aired a surveillance video of the Rite-Aid incident, police received two tips—one anonymous and one from an informant—that an individual named Cozzi resembled the half-masked subject in the video. The informant also told police where Cozzi lived and that Cozzi had a Lortab addiction.
Despite the tipsters’ detailed suspicions about Cozzi’s potential guilt, and despite the arguably corroborating pills found in Cozzi’s house, the Eleventh Circuit found that the officers lacked probable cause to arrest Cozzi given the “easily verifiable exculpatory information” regarding Cozzi’s tattoos (or lack thereof) available to them at the time. In fact, according to the Eleventh Circuit, there wasn’t even “arguable probable cause” that would entitle the officer to qualified immunity under the facts presented.
As the First Circuit reminds us this last week, a valid exception to the warrant requirement better apply before law enforcement goes traipsing through someone’s home without a warrant; palpably pretextual assertions later lodged as an exception cannot withstand scrutiny, especially when it comes to warrantless searches of the home, the “first among equals” under the Fourth Amendment. Florida v. Jardines, __U.S.__, 133 S.Ct. 1409, 1414 (2013) (“At the Amendment’s very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable government intrusion.”) (cleaned up).
In United States v. Diaz-Jimenez, law enforcement carried out a warrantless search of a suspect’s home more than eight hours after the completion of an armed bank robbery. The search also took place after the two suspects had already been arrested. The district court denied Mr. Diaz’s motion to suppress evidence seized from the warrantless intrusion, and he was convicted by a jury after a joint trial.
The court’s error, the First Circuit concluded, “was certainly not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt” given that the evidence was “central” to the government’s case.
The Tenth Circuit wants us to know a couple of things about gun charges and gun sentencing enhancements.
First, the bitter. In United States v. Melgar-Cabrera, the Tenth Circuit overruled circuit precedent to hold that 18 U.S.C § 924(j) (providing enhanced penalties for section 924(c) deaths) is a discrete, stand-alone crime. It is not just a sentencing enhancement. A person may be convicted and sentenced under section 924(j) even absent a conviction under section 924(c).
(2) that the defendant knew or had reason to know that the transferee fell into the guideline's narrow category of unlawful possessors (i.e., not just that the defendant knew or had reason to know that the transferee had some garden-variety felony): "The proper focus is on what the defendant knew about the specific transferee, not whether by the law of averages any given customer might qualify as an unlawful possessor as defined by § 2K2.1 cmt. n.13(A)(ii)(I), (B)."
Circuit split: USSG § 4B1.2's "commentary offenses"
We have over the past several years blogged about advocates’ need to be weary of enumerated “commentary offenses” that are inconsistent with the guidelines themselves. (See, e.g., here and here.) And last week, in United States v. Winstead, the D.C. Circuit created a new and notable circuit split on the issue.
Section 4B1.2(b) presents a very detailed “definition” of controlled substance offense that clearly excludes inchoate offenses . . . . [T]he Commission showed within § 4B1.2 itself that it knows how to include attempted offenses when it intends to do so. See USSG § 4b1.2(a)(1) (defining a “crime of violence” as an offense that “has an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force . . . .”) . . . . [S]urely Seminole Rock deference does not extend so far as to allow the Commission to invoke its general interpretive authority via commentary . . . to impose such a massive impact on a defendant with no grounding in the guidelines themselves.

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