Opinion ID: 6500514
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Collection of Pelullo’s Cell Site Location

Text: Information15 The Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) allows government investigators to collect suspects’ cell site location information (“CSLI”).16 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c). Investigators can obtain a court order to that end by submitting “specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the [data] are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Id. § 2703(d). In 2007 and 2008, prosecutors in this case repeatedly sought authorization to gain 15 We review a “denial of a motion to suppress for clear error as to the underlying factual findings and exercise plenary review over its application of the law to those facts.” United States v. Burnett, 773 F.3d 122, 130 (3d Cir. 2014). 16 “CSLI is a type of metadata that is generated every time a user’s cell phone connects to the nearest antenna. The user’s cell phone service provider retains a time-stamped record identifying the particular antenna to which the phone connected.” United States v. Goldstein, 914 F.3d 200, 202 (3d Cir. 2019). “Because most people constantly carry and frequently use their cell phones, CSLI can provide a detailed log of an individual’s movements over a period of time.” Id. 28 access to CSLI for Pelullo’s and Scarfo’s phones. 17 The District Court approved the requests, authorizing the collection from Pelullo’s cellphone provider of nine months of historical cell site data, going as far back as September 2006, and eleven months of prospective data, through May 2008.18 As trial approached, Pelullo moved to suppress that evidence based on the duration of the tracking and the government’s failure to show probable cause for obtaining the information. The District Court denied the motion, holding (in reliance on our precedent at the time) that probable cause was not required to obtain the CSLI and that, even if it was, the 17 The investigators also obtained authorization to use two other surveillance methods: pen registers to record outgoing phone numbers dialed on the phones, 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3), and trap-and-trace devices to record incoming phone numbers, id. § 3127(4). 18 “Prospective” CSLI means data collected after the government obtains court permission to acquire it, while “historical” CSLI describes data already in existence at the time of the court order. In re Application of U.S. for an Order Authorizing Installation & Use of a Pen Register & a Caller Identification Sys., 402 F. Supp. 2d 597, 599 (D. Md. 2005). The District Court similarly approved the collection of prospective and historical CSLI from Scarfo’s phone, and Scarfo moved alongside Pelullo in the District Court to suppress that data. But he does not, on appeal, challenge the Court’s denial of his suppression motion, so we are only concerned with Pelullo’s attack on the government’s gathering of CSLI from his phones. 29 evidence was nonetheless admissible by virtue of the goodfaith exception. Pelullo characterizes the government’s applications as “the most egregious and intrusive surveillance request ever filed by a United States Attorney.” (SP Opening Br. at 184.) He argues that the District Court erred in refusing to suppress the CSLI evidence obtained during the tracking. 19 His 19 Invoking Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 28(i), each Defendant purports to adopt all arguments of his “coappellants which are applicable to himself.” (SP Opening Br. at 223; NS Opening Br. at 183; WM Opening Br. at 36; JM Opening Br. at 49.) Each Defendant then identifies specific arguments advanced by codefendants that he intends to adopt. We will recognize their specific adoptions but not the “blanket request[s]” to adopt, which “fail[] to specify which of the many issues of [their] codefendants [they] believe[] worthy of our consideration.” United States v. Fattah, 914 F.3d 112, 146 n.9 (3d Cir. 2019) (citing Fed. R. App. P. 28(a)(5)). “[W]e will [not] scour the record and make that determination for [them].” Id.; accord Kost v. Kozakiewicz, 1 F.3d 176, 182 (3d Cir. 1993). Each Defendant has thus abandoned and forfeited any argument raised by his codefendants that he did not specifically adopt. As already noted, Scarfo did not adopt Pelullo’s CSLI argument. Supra note 18. Both Maxwells, however, did specifically adopt the argument. Their problem is they lack standing to pursue that Fourth Amendment claim, as no CSLI pertaining to them was collected by the government. See United States v. Cortez-Dutrieville, 743 F.3d 881, 883 (3d Cir. 2014) (defendant seeking “to invoke the Fourth Amendment’s 30 reasoning centers on Carpenter v. United States, in which the Supreme Court held that the collection of historical CSLI is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and that the SCA’s “reasonable grounds” standard for obtaining a court order “falls well short” of the probable cause standard the Fourth Amendment imposes. 138 S. Ct. 2206, 2219-21 (2018). Nobody disputes that, under Carpenter, acquiring a defendant’s CSLI without a warrant is an unconstitutional search. United States v. Goldstein, 914 F.3d 200, 203 (3d Cir. 2019). The question is whether Pelullo was entitled to a remedy for that violation of his Fourth Amendment rights – specifically, to have the illegally obtained CSLI suppressed at trial. The exclusionary rule is a “judicially created remedy” by which evidence is suppressed in order to “deter future Fourth Amendment violations.” Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229, 236-38 (2011). We do not reflexively apply it whenever an unconstitutional search takes place. Goldstein, 914 F.3d at 203. Instead, it is reserved for those cases where its expected deterrent effect justifies its use. Id. at 203-04. One set of circumstances in which suppression is not justified is when the government has an “objectively reasonable good faith belief in the legality of [its] conduct” at the time of the search. Id. at 204 (alteration in original). That good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule is satisfied when exclusionary rule” must have standing, which is the case when he has a “legitimate expectation of privacy in the invaded place” (citation omitted)). 31 the search in question was undertaken in “reli[ance] on a properly-obtained valid judicial order, a then-valid statute, and then-binding appellate authority[.]” Id. Here, prosecutors obtained CSLI pursuant to a court order following the SCA’s procedures, and, in 2007 and 2008, no binding precedent required them to do more. On the contrary, that was standard procedure at the time. See id.; United States v. Curtis, 901 F.3d 846, 849 (7th Cir. 2018); United States v. Joyner, 899 F.3d 1199, 1205 (11th Cir. 2018). Because we do not expect the government to have anticipated the “new rule” announced a decade later in Carpenter, its reliance on the SCA was reasonable, and so the good-faith exception applies to its acquisition of CSLI data without a warrant. Goldstein, 914 F.3d at 201, 204-05. Pelullo argues against that conclusion, saying that the government lacked a good- faith basis for seeking prospective CSLI – particularly over a lengthy time period – without a warrant. He seeks to cabin Carpenter and Goldstein as announcing a “new rule” only as to historical CSLI. 20 Tracking his movements in real time, Pelullo says, involved an “even greater intrusion into [his] privacy, for a far longer period of time[,]” and so the government should have known that it needed a warrant even prior to Carpenter. (SP Opening Br. at 189.) Yet Pelullo cites no pre-Carpenter authority from appellate courts that would have put the government on notice that seeking prospective CSLI required doing more than 20 For the distinction between prospective and historical CSLI, see supra note 18. 32 satisfying the SCA’s requirements.21 He cannot even show a consensus among district courts: at the time the orders at issue here were signed, courts had reached differing conclusions on whether officers seeking CSLI needed to show probable cause and get a warrant, and they were still grappling with the Fourth Amendment’s application to both historical and prospective CSLI. See, e.g., In re Applications of U.S. for Orders Pursuant to Title 18, U.S. Code Section 2703(d), 509 F. Supp. 2d 76, 7879, 78 n.4 (D. Mass. 2007) (noting a “disagreement among courts” and collecting cases that granted applications under the SCA standard and those that instead required a showing of probable cause). 22 Neither we nor the Supreme Court had addressed the issue. We did weigh in a few years after the searches here took place, in In re Application of the U.S. for an Order Directing a Provider of Electronic Communication 21 After argument, Pelullo brought to our attention Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc), in which the Fourth Circuit extended Carpenter to new aerial surveillance technology and enjoined the City of Baltimore’s use of it. Setting aside that the case does not deal with CSLI, it does not affect our analysis of the state of the law before the Supreme Court held in Carpenter that collecting historical CSLI constituted a search. 22 Some of those cases held that prospective CSLI was not authorized by the SCA. But even if the data collection here violated the SCA, “suppression is not a remedy for a violation of the [SCA]” and is only appropriate if “cell site location data was obtained … in violation of the Fourth Amendment.” United States v. Guerrero, 768 F.3d 351, 358 (5th Cir. 2014). 33 Service to Disclose Records to the Government, 620 F.3d 304, 312-13 (3d Cir. 2010), but that was only to decide that, for Fourth Amendment purposes, acquiring historical CSLI was not a search, a holding later abrogated by Carpenter. In sum, then, the officers lacked clear guidance from any caselaw, much less binding precedent, that would have put them on notice that obtaining prospective CSLI would require compliance with the Fourth Amendment. Undeterred, Pelullo highlights language in In re Application noting that CSLI could “be used to allow the inference of present, or even future, location” and thus resembles a tracking device. Id. He also points out that the D.C. Circuit held, prior to Carpenter, that GPS tracking requires a warrant. United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544, 563-64 (D.C. Cir. 2010). Based on those and other decisions, he says that, even before Carpenter, the heightened threat to privacy posed by prospective CSLI should have been evident to the officers. Setting aside that the GPS data considered by the D.C. Circuit reveals a person’s movements more precisely than does CSLI, which logs the suspect’s general area, “only binding appellate precedent” “at the time of the search” is relevant to the good-faith exception. Goldstein, 914 F.3d at 205. While conducting this investigation, prosecutors dealt with an unsettled area of law but relied in good faith on what was available to them – the plain text of the SCA and the court order they obtained in compliance with that Act. Given those circumstances, excluding the CSLI would not have “serve[d] any deterrent purpose[,]” id. at 204, and the District Court did not err in refusing to suppress the evidence. 34 Pelullo nonetheless insists that, even under the law as it then existed, the CSLI should have been suppressed because the government, in its applications for the court orders, misrepresented the technological capabilities of the equipment used to collect information from Pelullo’s phone and falsely claimed that the phone had a connection to New Jersey.23 He cites the principle that evidence must be suppressed “if the magistrate or judge in issuing a warrant was misled by information in an affidavit that the affiant knew was false or would have known was false except for his reckless disregard of the truth.” United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 923 (1984). His claim that the government made misrepresentations in those applications fails, however, because he did not first raise it before the District Court. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 12 requires that a request to suppress evidence “be raised by pretrial motion[.]” Fed. R. Crim. P. 12(b)(3)(C). As a result, a suppression argument raised for the first time on appeal is forfeited, and we do not consider it even under Rule 52(b)’s plain-error standard. United States v. Rose, 538 F.3d 175, 182-84 (3d Cir. 2008). Pelullo offers no explanation for why he did not object in the District Court to the alleged 23 Specifically, Pelullo argues that the government misrepresented both that it lacked the capability to collect outgoing phone numbers dialed on his cellphones using a pen register without also collecting dialed “content” information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers, and that it was unable to obtain precise “pin-point” location information for his phones using CSLI and could only ascertain the larger “sector” in which the phones were located. (SP Opening Br. at 195-98.) 35 misrepresentations, so there is no “good cause” to excuse his failure to do so. 24 Id. at 184-85. Even if Pelullo had not forfeited that suppression argument, his challenge to the evidence would prove fruitless. The government only introduced a small quantity of CSLI at trial. And what it did rely on merely served to corroborate other evidence of Pelullo’s whereabouts. For example, multiple witnesses testified that Pelullo was in Dallas during the takeover of FirstPlus, and, as a further example, visitor logs and security footage showed that Pelullo repeatedly visited Scarfo’s father in prison in Atlanta. Any alleged error in the admission of the CSLI was “rendered harmless” “in light of all of the other evidence” at trial.25 United States v. Perez, 280 F.3d 318, 338 (3d Cir. 2002). 24 It is true that Pelullo joined Scarfo’s challenge regarding the duration of the tracking and the lack of probable cause. But neither defendant raised the misrepresentation issue noted here, and accordingly it is forfeited. See United States v. Joseph, 730 F.3d 336, 342 (3d Cir. 2013) (holding that a suppression argument in the district court must match the argument in the court of appeals to be preserved). 25 Pelullo also argues that improprieties in the collection of the CSLI led to his conviction because they served as one of the bases for the government’s requests to conduct wiretaps. That, too, is not a basis for relief, since Pelullo makes no effort to show that the wiretap applications would have been devoid of probable cause without the CSLI. See Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 155-56 (1978) (holding that, when a defendant establishes the falsity of a statement in an affidavit used to 36