200 imprisoned after illegal cellphone tracking

Lawyers in Baltimore identified as many as 200 people who were sent to prison based on evidence police gathered with the help of a powerful cellphone tracking tool that a state court has ruled was used illegally.

The ruling, issued Wednesday by Maryland’s second-highest court, said Baltimore police violated the Constitution when they used one of the tracking devices to catch a shooting suspect with- out first obtaining a search warrant. It was the first time an appeals court weighed in directly on the legality of phone-trackers that have been widely used by police for nearly a decade.

“Cellphone users have an objectively reasonable expectation that their cellphones will not be used as real-time tracking devices, through the direct and active interference of law enforcement,” a panel of three judges on Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals wrote. The judges accused Baltimore detectives of misleading the lower- court judge who approved their use of the device, commonly known as a stingray.

That decision could imperil hundreds of criminal convictions across Maryland, where police have used stingrays prolifically. An investigation last year by USA TODAY identified nearly 2,000 cases in Baltimore alone in which the police secretly used stingrays to make arrests for everything from murder to petty thefts, typically without a search warrant.

“We have a grave concern that our clients are incarcerated because of the use of a stingray that was illegal,” said Natalie Finegar, who is reviewing stingray cases for the city’s public defender.

Finegar said defense lawyers are focused most urgently on about 200 cases in which people appear to have been sent to prison based on evidence the police found after they used a stingray. “Those are the emergencies,” she said. “By itself, it’s just a huge number of cases.”

Stingrays are suitcase-sized devices that allow the police to pinpoint a cellphone’s location to within a few yards by posing as a cell tower. They have drawn alarm from privacy advocates, in part because they can intercept information from the phones of nearly everyone nearby.

Dozens of police departments own stingrays, but few have revealed when or how they use them. The U.S. Justice Department ordered federal agents last year to obtain search warrants before using stingrays.

Maryland prosecutors can appeal to the state’s highest court. Christine Tobar, a spokeswoman for state Attorney General Brian Frosh, said he was “reviewing and evaluating next steps.”