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Christian Vernon Sims v. Texas

Paid petition · Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, No. PD-0941-17 · judgment January 16, 2019

Certiorari denied · June 24, 2019
Pre-decision estimate: 1% cert probability

Before the decision, well below the 4.1% base rate, with no standout signals pointing toward a grant.

Question presented

  1. In Carpenter v. United States, 138 S.Ct. 2206 (2018), this Court held that a person has a legitimate expectation of privacy in both real-time and historic cell-site location information (CSLI). The third-party doctrine was held inapplicable because CSLI data is not voluntarily turned over to a cellphone service provider. Thus, Carpenter had a legitimate expectation of privacy in at least seven days of historical CSLI data associated with his cellphone and the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it searched his phone without a warrant supported by probable cause. Petitioner Sims’s cellphone was tracked for an afternoon for about three hours’ worth of realtime CSLI records and without a warrant. And, his phone was pinged about five times to obtain his location-information. But, the TCCA determined that although a 5-4 split on this Court “supported the idea that longer-term surveillance might infringe on a person’s legitimate expectation of privacy if the location records reveal the privacies of his life,” Petitioner’s is not that case because apparently the surveillance, although it certainly occurred, was not pervasive enough. Question: Under the Fourth Amendment, does a person have a legitimate expectation of privacy in historic or real-time cellphone tracking data (CSLI) regardless of the duration of the tracking (seconds) or frequency of the tracking (number of pings)?

Counsel of record

For petitioner
Michael Mowla
Michael Mowla

For respondent
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Case

Conference history
Distributed for 1 conference

Proceedings

  1. Jun 24 2019
    Petition DENIED.
  2. Jun 04 2019
    DISTRIBUTED for Conference of 6/20/2019.
  3. Apr 16 2019
    Petition for a writ of certiorari filed. (Response due May 20, 2019)