Philip Zodhiates v. United States

Petitioner Philip Zodhiates was convicted of violation of the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act by aiding and abetting and conspiring to assist a mother’s effort to remove her daughter from the United States to protect her from abuse. Petitioner was sentenced to three years of incarceration followed by one year probation. At trial, the prosecution relied heavily on 28 months of cell-site location information (“CSLI”) detailing Petitioner’s whereabouts which had been seized from a telecommunications company through use of a grand jury subpoena—not a warrant issued by an independent judicial officer based on probable cause. Disregarding this Court’s intervening decision in Carpenter v. United States (issued June 22, 2018), holding that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant based on probable cause to obtain CSLI data, the Second Circuit decision (issued August 21, 2018) applied the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, thereby sanctioning a federal prosecutor’s calculated use of the unconstitutionally seized CSLI to obtain Petitioner’s conviction. 1. Does the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule allow use at trial of CSLI illegally seized by a prosecutor prior to this Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States, 138 S.Ct. 2206 (2018), under Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011)?