Stingray Search Violated Fourth Amendment

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed a conviction on Fourth Amendment grounds

A jury found appellant Prince Jones guilty of various offenses arising out of two alleged incidents of sexual assault and robbery at knifepoint. Mr. Jones appeals his convictions on the ground that much of the evidence offered against him at trial was the direct or indirect product of a warrantless—and thus, Mr. Jones argues, unlawful—search involving a cell-site simulator or “stingray.” Mr. Jones presented this Fourth Amendment claim to the trial court in a pretrial motion to suppress, but the trial court denied it under the inevitable-discovery doctrine and did not reach the question whether the government violated Mr. Jones‘s rights. We agree with Mr. Jones that the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it deployed the cell-site simulator against him without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause. Further, we reverse the trial court‘s inevitable-discovery ruling and reject the government‘s argument (not resolved by the trial court) that the good-faith doctrine precludes applying the exclusionary rule in this case. Because the admission at trial of the evidence obtained as a result of the unlawful search was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, we reverse Mr. Jones‘s convictions.

Associate Judge Beckwith authored the opinion in which Senior Judge Farrell concurred in large part.

Associate Judge Thompson dissented. (Mike Frisch)