Appeals court: police need a warrant to track a phone in real time with a cell-site simulator. The man they found still gets no remedy.

A federal appeals court has ruled that police who want to use a device mimicking a cellphone tower to locate someone must first get a warrant, Courthouse News Service reports. By the majority's account, the Sept. 24 Fourth Circuit decision is the first by a federal appeals court to squarely answer the question. "Despite the ubiquity of cell-site simulators, no federal court of appeals has squarely addressed whether law enforcement's use of this technology for realtime tracking of a cellphone constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment," Judge Nicole Berner wrote for the majority. "Today, we hold that it does." The case began in 2014, when Baltimore police used a cell-site simulator under a court order to pinpoint a man inside a specific townhouse. Berner wrote that the technology "is akin to sense-enhancing technology that allows the government to peer into a private home, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly held requires a warrant," and that it effectively "cracked open the front door." Prosecutors later dropped the case after a Maryland court found officers should have gotten a warrant, but by then the man had spent nearly two years in pretrial detention. Here's the catch. His civil suit still can't proceed, because the panel found the officers are protected by qualified immunity. Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. concurred in the judgment, writing that the panel should have first decided whether the man's constitutional rights had been violated. Police had argued their court order was functionally equivalent to a warrant. My view: this is the right rule, and it shouldn't have taken this long to say it. A tool that can find you inside your own home is a search, and searches need warrants. But a right without a remedy is a promise on paper. My standard doesn't change with who appointed the judges: when the government gets it wrong, somebody should be able to hold it to account.