Court: Locating suspect via stingray requires a warrant | Hacker News Reader

Court: Locating suspect via stingray requires a warrant

arstechnica.com

59 pointsmondoshawan7 comments

FTA: "But because Ellis was believed to be involved in another shooting that happened one day earlier on January 20, 2013, the judge felt there were exigent circumstances" [that didn't require a warrant].

So then they don't _necessarily_ require a warrant. It seems like nowadays, with the Patriot Act and similar law measures, you would have to completely ban in all cases something you don't want authorities to abuse. Otherwise, they will have an excuse for being unconstitutional they can take advantage of.

From Wikipedia:

In the criminal procedure context, exigent circumstance means the following: An emergency situation requiring swift action to prevent imminent danger to life or serious damage to property, or to forestall the imminent escape of a suspect, or destruction of evidence.

Seems reasonable to me

An alleged shooting an entire day earlier doesn't seem like much of an emergency.

There's a little more to the story than that. The suspect was in an apartment building surrounded by police, armed and dangerous. He lived in the building but wasn't in his apartment. The police were in the process of searching other apartments when they used the Stingray to locate him.

The argument made by the suspect is that the police should have obtained a warrant first because they had enough time to. There seems to be some merit to this (they had enough time to obtain search warrants for specific apartments) but that's something of a different question.

The story is discussed in detail in the order starting around page 20 here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3962321-Gov-Uscourts...

> forestall the imminent escape of a suspect, or destruction of evidence.

It seems like they would probably be arguing for this one.

Really ?

Haven't heard the term before and kinda hoped they had genuinely trained a Stingray fish to track people down.

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