Opinion ID: 742598
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Use of Pen Registers

Text: 51 During the investigation of the Supreme Team by State authorities, pen registers were used on telephones at the apartments of Supreme Team members or their relatives to identify the numbers dialed from those locations. Information thus gained was included in applications by the State for warrants permitting wiretaps. At a pretrial hearing during the State prosecution, an Assistant District Attorney (ADA) indicated that the registers used were likely of a new type that would have been capable, with minor alterations, of intercepting the contents of the telephone calls. The ADA stated, however, that the pen registers were not used to intercept contents. 52 Thereafter, while proceedings in the present prosecution were ongoing in the district court, the New York Court of Appeals decided People v. Bialostok, 80 N.Y.2d 738, 745, 594 N.Y.S.2d 701, 705, 610 N.E.2d 374 (1993), in which that court noted that although a traditional pen register recorded only the telephone numbers dialed and was incapable of intercepting the contents of the communications, the model at issue before it needed only the attachment of an audio cable, a tape recorder, and a wire to enable the interception of such contents. Although those modifications were not made until after a warrant was acquired, the court concluded that the ease of modification jeopardized the privacy of participants to wire communications and that a warrant should have been obtained prior to use of even the unmodified pen register. 53 In the present case, relying chiefly on Bialostok, defendants contend that the district court should have held a hearing to determine whether the pen registers used in investigating the Supreme Team had the capability of intercepting the contents of the communications. They argue that if the pen registers employed had that capability, the State's use of those devices did not conform to the requirements of State law; they contend that any resulting evidence should have been suppressed because under § 2516(2) of Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2510-2521 (1994) (Title III), orders by a state court authorizing the interception of wire communications are required to be in conformity with [18 U.S.C.] section 2518 ... and with the applicable State statute. 18 U.S.C. § 2516(2) (emphasis added). In so arguing, defendants also rely on dicta in three cases in which we considered conflicting state and federal wiretap standards: United States v. Manfredi, 488 F.2d 588 (2d Cir.1973), cert. denied, 417 U.S. 936, 94 S.Ct. 2651, 41 L.Ed.2d 240 (1974); United States v. Rizzo, 491 F.2d 215 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 416 U.S. 990, 94 S.Ct. 2399, 40 L.Ed.2d 769 (1974); and United States v. Marion, 535 F.2d 697 (2d Cir.1976). That trio of cases culminated in the following dictum: If a state should set forth procedures more exacting than those of the federal statute ... the validity of the interceptions and the orders of authorization by which they were made would have to comply with that test as well. Id. at 702 (emphasis in original). We have several difficulties with defendants' arguments. 54 First, Title III does not apply to pen registers performing their routine functions of merely recording the numbers to and from which calls are dialed. Title III generally prohibits the intentional interception of wire communications, including telephone conversations, in the absence of authorization by court order. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 2511, 2516-2518. [I]ntercept[ion] is defined as the aural or other acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic, or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device. Id. § 2510(4) (emphasis added). A pen register used merely to record the numbers dialed does not intercept the contents of a communication. Accordingly, Title III does not require law enforcement authorities to obtain court authorization for the installation of a pen register. See Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 739-46, 99 S.Ct. 2577, 2579-83, 61 L.Ed.2d 220 (1979). Although the Smith Court dealt only with traditional models of pen register, we view its holding as applying also to models that have not been altered so as to enable interception of a wire communication's contents. Title III guards against actual infringements of privacy, not purely hypothetical ones. Accord United States v. Veksler, 62 F.3d 544, 549 (3rd Cir.1995) (mere suggestion that pen register equipment is now capable of misuse does not give us a basis to depart from the controlling precedent of the Smith case), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 116 S.Ct. 780, 133 L.Ed.2d 731 (1996). We conclude that § 2516(2)'s reference to compliance with state law for wiretap authorizations was not applicable to the pen registers employed here and that that section provided no basis for requiring the district court to hold a hearing to determine whether those pen registers, though not capable in the form used of intercepting the contents of wire communications, were capable of being modified to enable such interception. 55 Second, even if Title III were applicable, defendants' reliance on the Manfredi-Rizzo-Marion trilogy would be unavailing for several reasons. To begin with, the dicta in those cases have never been applied to exclude evidence. This Court noted in United States v. Sotomayor, 592 F.2d 1219 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 442 U.S. 919, 99 S.Ct. 2842, 61 L.Ed.2d 286 (1979), that even if given wiretap evidence would not be admissible in a New York State court, we did 56 not consider Manfredi and its progeny to obligate us automatically to apply in a federal proceeding all provisions of a state wiretap statute containing more stringent requirements than those prescribed by Title III. We believe that at most Manfredi requires us, in determining whether to admit a wiretap obtained by a state officer acting under a state court order issued pursuant to a state statute, to apply only those more stringent state statutory requirements or standards that are designed to protect an individual's right of privacy, as distinguished from procedural rules that are essentially evidentiary in character. 57 Id. at 1225. Moreover, even the interpretive dicta of Sotomayor, suggesting that a state's more stringent statutory requirements might be applied in a federal prosecution if those requirements were more substantive than procedural, have never been applied to bar the introduction of wiretap evidence. Cf. United States v. Rowell, 903 F.2d 899, 902-03 (2d Cir.1990) (criticizing the reasoning of Sotomayor, applying federal standards for probable cause to a state-issued wiretap warrant, and affirming denial of suppression motion); United States v. Workman, 80 F.3d 688, 695 n. 4 (2d Cir.) (noting that Sotomayor is somewhat at odds with our holdings in more recent cases), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 319, 136 L.Ed.2d 233 (1996). 58 Further, we have refused to apply retroactively state decisions announcing a more restrictive interpretation of state wiretap law to evidence obtained by state officers acting in good faith based on existing interpretations of state law if doing so were contrary to the interests of justice. In United States v. Aiello, 771 F.2d 621 (2d Cir.1985), for example, we declined to suppress a state-authorized wiretap for failure to comply with timing requirements governing extension applications, even though two state decisions issued since the time of the wiretap had indicated that the relevant statute was designed to protect privacy interests. We held instead that when the state officer ... relies in good faith on pre-existing less stringent state court interpretations, we will not apply new interpretations retroactively, at least when to do so would not serve the interests of justice. Id. at 627. In United States v. Spadaccino, 800 F.2d 292 (2d Cir.1986), we again applied this good faith exception where there had been no prior authoritative state court interpretation. Id. at 297. Here, defendants rely on the New York Court of Appeals decision in Bialostok, which was handed down well after the state had completed its use of the pen registers in this case. There is no claim that the state officers who employed the pen registers violated then-existing state law, nor any basis on which to infer a need for a hearing into their good faith. 59 Finally, we note that even suppression of the fruits of the pen registers would not require suppression of the evidence obtained in the wiretaps. See generally United States v. Nanni, 59 F.3d 1425, 1433 (2d Cir.) (wiretap authorization will not be invalidated if flawed information in the application was so inconsequential that warrant would have been issued without that information), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 116 S.Ct. 576, 133 L.Ed.2d 499 (1995); People v. Bialostok, 594 N.Y.S.2d at 705, 610 N.E.2d 374 (erroneous use of pen register data in wiretap application was harmless where other evidence supporting the application ... provided ... probable cause). In the present case, the police relied on several other acceptable sources to show probable cause for authorization of the wiretaps, including the debriefings of multiple informants, surveillance of gang members, and permissibly intercepted telephone calls made from prisons. Thus, even if we were to conclude that the district court erred in not ruling that a warrant was required for the use of the pen registers in this case, we would conclude that that error was harmless.