WASHINGTON -- In a new case about digital age technology and privacy, the Supreme Court said Monday that it will consider whether police need warrants to review cellphone-tower records that help them track the location of criminal suspects.
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The justices agreed to hear an appeal from Timothy Carpenter, 32, of Detroit, who was sentenced to 116 years in prison after being convicted of armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio.
Police obtained records from cellular service providers that placed Carpenter's cellphone in the vicinity of the robberies.
The question is whether police should have to demonstrate to a judge that they have good reason, or probable cause, to believe Carpenter was involved in the crime. Police obtained the records by meeting a lower standard of proof.
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Courts around the country have wrestled with the issue. The most relevant Supreme Court case is nearly 40 years old, before the dawn of the digital age.
In 1979, in Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that a robbery suspect had no reasonable expectation that his right to privacy extended to the numbers dialed from his phone. The court reasoned that the suspect had voluntarily turned over that information to a third party: the phone company.
Relying on the Smith decision's "third-party doctrine," federal appeals courts have said that government investigators seeking data from cellphone companies showing users' movements do not require a warrant.
In Carpenter's case, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati ruled in April 2016 that police did not need a judge-issued warrant. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that while the contents of personal communications are private, under long-standing legal interpretations, "the information necessary to get those communications from point A to point B is not," including data on which cellphone towers are used.
Nathan Freed Wessler, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents Carpenter, said the high court should apply constitutional privacy protections to digital records.
"Because cellphone-location records can reveal countless private details of our lives, police should only be able to access them by getting a warrant based on probable cause," Wessler said.
The robberies took place at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in 2010 and 2011. Carpenter organized most of the robberies, in which he signaled the others in his group to enter the stores with their guns drawn, the government said in its Supreme Court filing. Customers and employees were herded to the back and the robbers filled their bags with new smartphones. They got rid of the guns and sold the phones, the government said.
Police learned of Carpenter's involvement after a confession by another person involved in the holdups. They got an order for cellphone-tower data for Carpenter's phone, which shows which towers a phone has connected with when used in a call. The records help approximate someone's location.
The case, Carpenter v. U.S., 16-402, will be argued in the court's next term, which begins in October.
Information for this article was contributed by Mark Sherman of The Associated Press; by Adam Liptak of The New York Times; and by Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press.
A Section on 06/06/2017