Fifth Circuit: No Fourth Amendment Standing in Another Person’s Cell Site Location Information
This case law update was written by Michael J. Sgarlat, an attorney at the law firm of Shaw Bransford & Roth, where he has practiced federal personnel and employment law since 2015. Mr. Sgarlat works with federal employees to respond to proposed disciplinary and adverse actions, and has experience litigating cases before the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
While conducting a narcotics investigation, the Monroe Police Department learned from drug dealers and cooperating witnesses that Matthew Beaudion and his girlfriend, Jessica Davis, were distributing drugs. Officers obtained Davis’s phone number from one witness. The witness also told the officers that Beaudion and Davis planned to drive from Houston to Monroe with four pounds of meth.
Monroe Police Officer Heckard used the information obtained from the witness to request a search warrant. In the warrant application, Officer Heckard asked for the GPS coordinates of Davis’s cell phone for the next sixteen hours. The district judge found probable cause to support the request and issued the warrant. Thereafter, Officer Heckard faxed the warrant to Verizon’s law-enforcement division, and Verizon agreed to provide the coordinates of Davis’s phone as many times as Officer Heckard called to request them in the sixteen-hour window.
Officer Heckard called Verizon six times, and each time received a verbal recitation of the most recent GPS data and estimated margin of error. The coordinates confirmed that Davis was headed east towards Monroe. Officers spread out along the interstate and waited for Davis to arrive. They stopped the car, searched it, and discovered meth. They then arrested Davis and Beaudion, and seized Davis’s phone.
Beaudion was charged with conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute meth. He moved to suppress the drugs and other evidence on the argument that the warrant authorizing GPS tracking was defective. A magistrate judge recommended denying the motion for lack of Fourth Amendment standing, and the district court adopted that recommendation. The district court held that Beaudion’s warrant-related arguments did not entitle him to relief. Beaudion entered a conditional guilty plea, and appealed his conviction and sentence to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, challenging the denial of his motion to suppress.
The court of appeals rejected Beaudion’s claim, stating that standing ensures that those invoking the Fourth Amendment “vindicate only their personal security against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The court of appeals explained that a criminal defendant seeking to suppress evidence obtained through search and seizure must show that “his own Fourth Amendment rights [were] infringed by the search [or] seizure which he seeks to challenge.” The court further explained that Fourth Amendment standing is not a jurisdictional question, and that it is subsumed under the Fourth Amendment doctrine protecting a person’s security in his or her person, house, papers, and effects.
Here, the parties agreed the government conducted a search when it used the GPS coordinates from Verizon to locate Davis’s phone. The court reviewed the district court’s standing determination de novo and its factual findings for clear error.
To determine whether Beaudion has standing, the court stated it first needed to identify the place searched. The warrant authorized Officer Heckard to search the GPS coordinates and registered owner information for a specific cell phone number – Davis’s number. The court concluded that the GPS coordinates of Davis’s phone constitute the relevant “place searched.”
Beaudion contended the court should go further, and find that the government’s search extended beyond Davis and her phone to include Beaudion and the car in which he and Davis were traveling. The court disagreed, stating that the Supreme Court has rejected the “target” theory of a search under which “any criminal defendant at whom a search was ‘directed’ would have standing to contest the legality of that search.” The court concluded that the “place searched” was limited to location information about Davis.
The court of appeals next considered whether Beaudion has a Fourth Amendment property or privacy interest in the location information obtained about Davis. Though the court concluded that Davis would have a reasonable expectation of privacy in her phone and its location, Beaudion did not.
Beaudion raised several facts that should have rendered a finding that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in Davis’s phone, including that he purchased the phone and gave it to Davis, had permission to use the phone, had password access to the phone, accessed his Facebook through the phone, and used the phone to capture intimate videos of him and Davis. The court stated that most of these facts just show the Beaudion “sometimes” used Davis’s phone for personal activities, and no evidence shows that he used the phone outside of Davis’s presence. According to the court, the record shows that Davis was the “primary user” of the phone, as she had the phone number before she met Beaudion, maintained possession of the phone, and that her parents paid for the phone bill.
Moreover, the court of appeals stated that the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018), does not change the result. According to the court of appeals, Carpenter did not address whether an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in a record that reveals someone else’s location. The court found that here the GPS coordinates revealed to the officers told them nothing about Beaudion specifically.
As such, the court found that Beaudion’s claim to Fourth Amendment standing fails, and affirmed the decision of the district court.
Read the full case: United States v. Beaudion
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