Northern District of West Virginia Finds No Ineffective Assistance of Counsel in Failure to Predict Carpenter in Advance, and That Call Records Are Still Governed by the Third Party Doctrine

In this case, the defendant, pro se, filed a 28 U.S.C. § 2255 petition claiming he was denied ineffective assistance of counsel. The basis of this assertion for this blog’s purposes is that his lawyer should have forseen the ruling in Carpenter and made a motion to suppress the evidence recovered from the warrantless retrieval of his call records.

The Court dismissed this petition, finding that failure to forsee the Carpenter holding does not constitute ineffective assistance and that call records (number, and the dates, times, and length of the calls) are sill governed by the third party doctrine and not by Carpenter’s holding.

The case is McGee v. United States, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 54420, 2019 WL 1440308 N.D. W. VA (March 29, 2019).