(Baltimore) 2,000 cases may be overturned because police used secret Stingray surveillance

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

2,000 cases may be overturned because police used secret Stingray surveillance

A motion filed Friday says the State’s Attorney’s office colluded with police to
withhold ‘discovery’ material obtained via Stingrays from defendants

Nicky Woolf in Baltimore
Friday 4 September 2015 19.09 BST

More than 2,000 cases could be overturned in Baltimore as the first motion for a retrial is filed accusing the state’s attorney’s office and the police of “deliberate and wilful misrepresentation” of the use of the secret surveillance equipment known as Stingrays.

The motion, which was filed on behalf of defendant Shemar Taylor by attorney Josh Insley in the Baltimore city circuit court on Friday, says the state’s attorney’s office colluded with the police department to withhold “discovery” material from the defendants and the courts about the use of the Stingray device. Taylor was convicted of assault, robbery and firearm possession.

Manufactured by the Harris corporation and around the size of a briefcase, Stingrays are one of a class of surveillance devices known as “cell-site simulators”, which pretend to be cellphone towers in order to extract metadata, location information, and in some cases content from phones that connect to it.

Prosecutors are required to reveal the evidence against defendants in the “discovery” phase of a criminal trial.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/04/baltimore-cases-overturned-police-secret-stingray-surveillance

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1. USA Today: "Police secretly track cellphones to solve routine crimes"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/08/23/baltimore-police-stingray-cell-surveillance/31994181/

BALTIMORE — The crime itself was ordinary: Someone smashed the back window of a parked car one evening and ran off with a cellphone. What was unusual was how the police hunted the thief.

Detectives did it by secretly using one of the government’s most powerful phone surveillance tools — capable of intercepting data from hundreds of people’s cellphones at a time — to track the phone, and with it their suspect, to the doorway of a public housing complex. They used it to search for a car thief, too. And a woman who made a string of harassing phone calls.

In one case after another, USA TODAY found police in Baltimore and other cities used the phone tracker, commonly known as a stingray, to locate the perpetrators of routine street crimes and frequently concealed that fact from the suspects, their lawyers and even judges. In the process, they quietly transformed a form of surveillance billed as a tool to hunt terrorists and kidnappers into a staple of everyday policing...

...Police and court records in Baltimore offer a partial answer. USA TODAY obtained a police surveillance log and matched it with court files to paint the broadest picture yet of how those devices have been used. The records show that the city's police used stingrays to catch everyone from killers to petty thieves, that the authorities regularly hid or obscured that surveillance once suspects got to court and that many of those they arrested were never prosecuted.

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2. Link to the transcript of the Taylor case:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2291303-md-v-shemar-taylor-stingray-hearing.html#document/p73/a236312