Supreme Court won’t hear Quartavious Davis search warrant case

The Supreme Court has declined to weigh in on the case against Quartavious Davis, a Florida man convicted of armed robbery in 2011, ending years of legal wrangling over whether authorities had legally obtained the evidence used against him.

An announcement released Monday by the court confirmed it won’t hear arguments in the case — a federal matter concerning not the string of armed robberies attributed to the man, but rather the method used by law enforcement officials to gather evidence against him.

Davis was indicted in 2011 after authorities obtained location information from his cellphone service provider, MetroPCS, linking him to the scenes of several hold-ups that occurred a year before. He was subsequently convicted on all 16 counts and sentenced to nearly 162 years in prison without parole, but defense attorneys quickly appealed, arguing that police had erred by collecting the phone records without a search warrant.

A three-member panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that the government had violated Davis’s Fourth Amendment rights by not obtaining a warrant, but that decision was reversed earlier this year when the case was revisited by the court’s full bench.

“Davis can assert neither ownership nor possession of the third party’s business records he sought to suppress. Instead, those cell tower records were created by MetroPCS, stored on its own premises and subject to its control,” the court said in a 9-2 ruling in May.

“The records were obtained through a court order authorized by a federal statute, not by means of governmental trespass,” the court continued. “MetroPCS, not the government, built and controlled the electronic mechanism [the cell towers] and collected its cell tower data for legitimate business purposes.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, responded to the Supreme Court’s decision this week by saying the time is ripe for Congress to “clarify a tangled mess of legal decisions around electronic tracking of Americans’ movements.”

“It’s clear the courts won’t resolve this question any time soon, so Congress needs to step up and make sure that Americans’ cellphones aren’t being used as warrantless government GPS trackers,” Mr. Wyden said.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, no fewer than 13 federal agencies and 50 state and local law enforcement organizations possess devices commonly referred to as “StingRays” that mimic cellphone towers in order to give police location data without having to reach out to telecoms.

Last week, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, proposed legislation that would require officials obtain a search warrant before deploying such a device.