As part of a federal and state law enforcement investigation into a series of armed robberies that took place in October 2017in Michigan and Indiana, an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (“ATF”) agent traced a firearm recovered from one of the robberies to a previous owner, who said he had sold it to Rex Hammond and gave them Hammond’s cell phone number. Without obtaining a search warrant, a local police detective then requested cell site location information (“CSLI”) from AT&T to geolocate Hammond’s cell phone using real-time pings to nearby cell towers about every fifteen minutes. The detective also obtained historical CSLI records indicating where Hammond had been over the course of three weeks. One night, around 11:30 p.m., detectives located Hammond’s car using a cell phone ping and began following him when he left a Quality Inn parking lot after midnight. Police stopped Hammond for speeding and failing to signal, and then placed him under arrest.
A grand jury indicted Hammond on eight charges related to the robberies, and Hammond was found guilty of all counts and sentenced to a total of forty-seven years in prison. A district court denied Hammond’s motion to suppress the evidence against him, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Hammond’s attorneys warned that “real-time cell phone pinging thus allows the state to surreptitiously track the movements of any individual with a cell phone (essentially all Americans) with a voyeuristic level of precision, and without ever leaving the precinct.”
The Rutherford Institute’s amicus brief in Hammond v. U.S., filed in cooperation with the Cato Institute, is available at www.rutherford.org. Paul J. Sampson, Bradley Masters, and Stephen A. Tensmeyer of Kirkland & Ellis LLP advanced the Fourth Amendment arguments in the amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
Source: https://bit.ly/3qnmIEG
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