United States v. Gloria Taylor

54 F.4th 795
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit·Decided December 5, 2022·No. 20-7593·Published·Cited by 14 cases

Opinion

PUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 20-7593

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.

GLORIA PATRICIA TAYLOR, Defendant - Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, at Greenbelt. Theodore D. Chuang, District Judge. (8:15-cr-00265-TDC-1; 8:19-cv-00065-TDC)

Argued: October 25, 2022 Decided: December 5, 2022

Before GREGORY, Chief Judge, and WYNN and THACKER, Circuit Judges.

Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Thacker wrote the opinion, in which Chief Judge Gregory and Judge Wynn joined.

ARGUED: Stephen Bennett Mercer, RAQUINMERCER LLC, Rockville, Maryland, for Appellant. Christopher Michael Sarma, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Greenbelt, Maryland, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Erek L. Barron, United States Attorney, Baltimore, Maryland, Kelly O. Hayes, Assistant United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Greenbelt, Maryland, for Appellee.

THACKER, Circuit Judge:

Appellant Gloria Patricia Taylor (“Appellant”) appeals the district court’s order denying relief on her 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion to vacate, set aside, or correct her sentence. Appellant claimed that her trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance by failing to move to suppress information obtained from a search warrant that relied, in part, on the Government’s warrantless procurement of certain data from her cell phone service provider. Because the Government relied in good faith on court orders issued in accordance with the Federal Stored Communications Act (“SCA”), 18 U.S.C. § 2703 et. seq., did not request the data in its subpoenas, and the use of a subpoena to obtain the data was lawful at the time, we hold the district court’s admission of the challenged evidence must be sustained. Thus, any motion to suppress filed before Appellant’s trial would not have been meritorious. Therefore, we affirm.

I.

A.

In June 2013, United States Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) agents in Tucson, Arizona, notified their Maryland counterparts that a suspicious shipment leaving Tucson was scheduled to arrive at a shipping depot in Brentwood, Maryland. On July 1, 2013, at approximately 7:00am, DEA agents seized three crates containing approximately 1,387 pounds of marijuana from R&L Carriers, a delivery company located in Baltimore, Maryland. Two of the crates were addressed to Royal Gem & Mineral (“Royal Gem”) in Landover, Maryland, and the third crate was addressed to Artistique Connection (“Artistique”) in Brentwood.

DEA agents in Tucson identified Appellant as a potential suspect because surveillance footage captured a vehicle rented in Appellant’s name parked outside the Tucson shipping depot when the three crates of marijuana shipped. Investigators then subpoenaed Southwest Airlines for Appellant’s travel records and discovered that Appellant had booked numerous flights to and from Phoenix, Arizona. Appellant’s flight times were consistent with the timing of several shipments from Tucson to various locations in Maryland, including to Royal Gem and Artistique.

As part of its investigation into Appellant, the DEA served several administrative subpoenas pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 876 1 and the SCA on the telecommunications company Sprint Corporation (“Sprint”). 2 The SCA prohibits companies that provide electronic communication services from disclosing the contents of the information stored on their systems, except under certain circumstances where the government may compel a provider to disclose such content. See 18 U.S.C. § 2703(a)–(d). Relevant here, the DEA issued three subpoenas covering the following periods:

• October 9, 2013 to January 6, 2014 (issued on January 7, 2014);

1

Pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 876, “the Attorney General may subpoena witnesses, compel the attendance and testimony of witnesses, and require the production of any records . . . which the Attorney General finds relevant or material to” an investigation into certain “controlled substance” offenses.

2

The Sprint Corporation merged with T-Mobile US, Inc. on April 1, 2020.

T‑Mobile Completes Merger with Sprint to Create the New T‑Mobile, T-Mobile (Apr. 1, 2020), https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-sprint-one-company (saved as ECF opinion attachment).

• January 7, 2014 to February 18, 2014 (issued on February 19, 2014); and

• February 19, 2014 to May 14, 2014 (issued on May 15, 2014).

Each subpoena requested “All customers/subscribers for the date range given, provide name and street and/or mailing address, Local and long distance telephone connection records, including incoming and outgoing calls for: 757-945-6589.” J.A. 954–56. 3 In response to the subpoenas, Sprint turned over Appellant’s subscriber and account information along with “call detail reports” for the requested periods. J.A. 934. The call detail reports for the target phone number included the calling number, the called number, the digits dialed, the type of call, the start and end time and date for each call, and the duration of each call. Additionally, for each of the three subpoenas, Sprint included the “repoll” data for every call in the call records. A repoll number “reflects which phone switch handled the call,” and each number is associated with a specific metropolitan area or areas. Id. For example, repoll number “27” is associated with Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and repoll number “40” is associated with Little Rock, Arkansas. The call detail reports for Appellant’s phone number showed several of the calls made and received between October 2013 and January 2014 were associated with a repoll number of “449,” which corresponds to a phone switch for the Phoenix metropolitan area.

On March 12, 2014, a federal magistrate judge in Maryland issued an administrative order pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) requiring the production of historical cellular site

3

Citations to the “J.A.” refer to the Joint Appendix filed by the parties in this appeal.

location information (“CSLI”) for the (757) 945-6589 phone number, which DEA agents had linked to Appellant. On May 2, 2014, the Government, using the historical CSLI, obtained a prospective Global Positioning System (“GPS”) tracking warrant pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 4 and 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(1)(A), 5 which was extended several times. Investigators used the GPS data to determine that Appellant travelled to Tucson on July 15, 2014 and returned to Maryland on July 23, 2014. GPS data also put Appellant in Tucson again from September 20–23, 2014.

On September 30, 2014, DEA agents used GPS data to track Appellant to a U-Haul facility in Landover, Maryland, where agents observed Appellant rent a U-Haul van. At approximately 3:46pm, law enforcement officers saw the same U-Haul parked in Appellant’s driveway and watched Appellant and her son unload items from it. At approximately 4:43pm, officers observed Appellant and her son removing a large wooden crate from the back of the U-Haul. At that point, the officers detained Appellant and her son, pending a search and seizure warrant application. The officers then conducted a dog sniff, which revealed that the crate contained a suspicious substance. 6 At 4:58pm,

4

Rule 41 permits a magistrate judge to issue a warrant for the installation of a tracking device based on a finding of probable cause. Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(d).

5

The SCA authorizes the use of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to obtain “a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer” of an “electronic communication service.” 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(1)(A). The statute itself does not preclude the collection of real-time tracking data. See id.

6

The district court separately addressed Appellant’s additional claim that her trial counsel failed to file a motion to suppress based on a dog sniff of the U-Haul van from inside the curtilage of the residence. However, we denied Appellant’s post-oral argument (Continued)

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