In a very brief order in this case, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division has followed suit with other federal courts and also denied a motion to suppress based on the good faith exception to the warrant requirement.
The District Court noted that at the time of the applications and orders at issue in this case, binding precedent existed in the 11th Circuit holding that a search warrant was not necessary to obtain historical cell-site location data, citing United States v. Davis, 785 F.3d 498, 518 (11th Cir. 2015) (en banc).
The District Court invoked the well known good faith case from the United States Supreme Court of Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229, 241, 131 S. Ct. 2419, 180 L. Ed. 2d 285 (2011) as well as other 11th Circuit precedent to hold that the evidence would not be suppressed.
It will be interesting to see what federal courts will say that do not have such prior Circuit precedent to authorize the warrantless review of Cell Site Location Information.
The case is United States v. Hearst, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 126005 (July 3).