UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,
v.
Melvin SKINNER, Defendant–Appellant.
v.
Melvin SKINNER, Defendant–Appellant.
Decided and Filed: Aug. 14, 2012.
ROGERS, Circuit Judge.
When
criminals use modern technological devices to carry out criminal acts
and to reduce the possibility of detection, they can hardly complain
when the police take advantage of the inherent characteristics of those
very devices to catch them. This is not a case in which the government
secretly placed a tracking device in someone's car. The drug runners
in this case used pay-as-you-go (and thus presumably more difficult to
trace) cell phones to communicate during the cross-country shipment of
drugs. Unfortunately for the drug runners, the phones were trackable
in a way they may not have suspected. The Constitution, however, does
not protect their erroneous expectations regarding the undetectability
of their modern tools.
The
government used data emanating from Melvin Skinner's pay-as-you-go cell
phone to determine its real-time location. This information was used
to establish Skinner's location as he transported drugs along public
thoroughfares between Arizona and Tennessee. As a result of tracking
the cell phone, DEA agents located Skinner and his son at a rest stop
near Abilene, Texas, with a motorhome filled with over 1,100 pounds of
marijuana. The district court denied Skinner's motion to suppress all
evidence obtained as a result *775
of the search of his
vehicle, and Skinner was later convicted of two counts related to drug
trafficking and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The convictions must be upheld as there was no Fourth Amendment
violation, and Skinner's other arguments on appeal lack merit. In
short, Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the
data emanating from his cell phone that showed its location.
No comments:
Post a Comment