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W.D. Wis.: Maybe first application of Herring; no basis for stop so search was suppressed

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Officers lacked reasonable suspicion using a trap-and-trace order to tail a cellphone like it was a beeper a day after a robbery. There was only a hunch as to defendant. Herring would not be applied to salvage this search because it was all tenuous. United States v. Thomas, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4389 (W.D. Wis. January 20, 2009): In any event, the deputies obtained a trap-and-trace order from the state court that allowed them to attempt to locate the telephone and its holder. The day after the robbery, using technology that either is prosaically old school (the court's view) or "voodoo" (defense counsel's view), a caravan of law enforcement officers led by a DCI tech agent chased the telephone northeast up Highway 151 to Fond du Lac. Using the target telephone essentially as a "beeper," the tech agent was able to pinpoint its location to a pump island at a gas station...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on January 25, 2009 (boomark / email).