United States v. Davis
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2015
- Citation
- 785 F.3d 498 (11th Cir. 2015) (en banc)
- Standard applied
- SCA § 2703(d) orders for historical cell-tower location records
What the court held
Sitting en banc, the Eleventh Circuit held that a court order under § 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act compelling a telephone company to produce its business records containing historical cell-tower location information did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The denial of the motion to suppress was affirmed and the convictions upheld.
Why
The court treated the records as the carrier's own business records about its network rather than the subscriber's papers, and applied the third-party framework to conclude that compelling their production was not a search of the defendant. It reinstated the vacated panel opinion on every issue except those it decided itself.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Davis was the leading authority for warrantless § 2703(d) collection of historical location data until Carpenter reached the opposite result three years later, and it is included so the shift is visible. Its practical relevance now is transitional: cases built on pre-2018 § 2703(d) returns turn on good faith rather than on this holding. The framing it relied on — that the records belong to the carrier, not the customer — is also the argument still made about every other category of automatically generated telecoms record.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: CSLI · Stored Communications Act · en banc · superseded by Carpenter
Cited 133times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on fourth amendment and privacy & surveillance
- United States v. JonesSupreme Court of the United States · 2012Attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Th…
- Riley v. CaliforniaSupreme Court of the United States · 2014Police generally may not search the digital contents of a cell phone seized incident to an arrest without a warrant. The search-incident-to-arrest exception, wh…
- Carpenter v. United StatesSupreme Court of the United States · 2018The government's acquisition of historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a Fourth Amendment search, and generally requires a warrant…
- United States v. WarshakCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit · 2010A subscriber has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of e-mails stored with, or sent or received through, a commercial internet service provider…
- In re Application of the United States for Historical Cell Site DataCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · 2013Court orders authorised by the Stored Communications Act compelling cell-phone service providers to produce subscribers' historical cell-site information are no…
- United States v. GrahamCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit · 2016Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit held that a cell-phone user has no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site location information held by hi…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.