Mark A. Witaschek v. District of Columbia

Petitioner Mark Witaschek was convicted in the District of Columbia courts of two counts of income tax evasion. The incriminating evidence consisted primarily of materials gathered by the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue pursuant to twenty-six administrative summonses issued to third parties. Mr. Witaschek moved to suppress that evidence as violative of the Fourth Amendment. Relying on the third-party doctrine as declared in Miller v. United States, 425 U.S. 435 (1976) and Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), the D.C. Superior Court denied the motion to suppress, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. THE QUESTIONS PRESENTED ARE:

1. Whether the Fourth Amendment’s third-party doctrine should be overruled, limited, or held inapplicable when the government collects massive digitally recorded data revealing a detailed mosaic of an individual’s private life without satisfying any threshold of suspicion or vetting by a neutral magistrate consistent with Carpenter v. United States, 138 S.Ct. 2206 (2018).

2. Whether the District of Columbia Court of Appeals erred in upholding the denial of Petitioner’s motion to suppress by concluding that criminal investigators of the Office of Tax and Revenue held an objectively reasonable, good faith belief in the constitutionality of twenty-six (26) suspicionless administrative summonses used to gather 4,000 predominantly irrelevant documents providing a detailed mosaic of Petitioner’s personal life over a period of seven years.