By Cristian Farias, June 13, 2019.
Timothy Carpenter won’t be remembered for the circumstances that landed him in prison, but for the Supreme Court case that bears his name.
Carpenter v. United States, which set a new benchmark for privacy in the digital age, requires the police to obtain a warrant before obtaining cellphone location history from a phone company. Privacy advocates hailed the ruling, and saw in it the potential for broader protections for personal data in the digital age.
Yet one curiosity of the case, as with similar Fourth Amendment rulings that limit the government’s reach into our private lives, is that it won’t be of any help to Mr. Carpenter. This week, a federal appeals court decided that Mr. Carpenter’s big victory at the Supreme Court won’t spare him from going to prison for the rest of his life.
Make no mistake: Mr. Carpenter was convicted of a series of federal offenses, including robbery and gun-related charges. But prosecutors secured the 116-year prison sentence against him with the help of cell-site location information that the Supreme Court later said was unlawfully obtained.
Unlike other types of criminal cases decided by the Supreme Court, which may result in a reversed conviction or a new chance to prove one’s innocence, successful challenges to government searches and seizures routinely seek suppression of the tainted evidence. Under what’s called the exclusionary rule, any evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution cannot be used at trial.
In Mr. Carpenter’s case, that meant about 129 days’ worth of cellphone tracking data pinpointing his every move, which the government used at trial to connect him to a string of robberies in Michigan and Ohio. The Supreme Court concluded that obtaining these records without a warrant violated Mr. Carpenter’s rights under the Fourth Amendment.
That should have meant a decisive victory for Mr. Carpenter, because the evidence used against him was illicitly obtained. Not so, said the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which took the Supreme Court’s pronouncement and more or less said that it didn’t matter…
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