United States v. Yang

Court

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Decided

May 4, 2020

Citation

No. 18-10341 (9th Cir. 2020)

Docket

No. 18-10341

Binding in

Ninth Circuit (AK, AZ, CA, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, WA, GU, MP)

Status

Fact-specific

Read the opinion (No. 18-10341 · May 4, 2020)

The question

Could a defendant challenge, under Carpenter, a warrantless search of a private ALPR database that located him and the overdue rental car he was driving?

The facts

Jay Yang was seen on surveillance cameras taking mail from post office collection boxes while driving a rented GMC Yukon. The rental company told a postal inspector the vehicle was about six days overdue and that it had tried to repossess it. The inspector queried LEARN, a license plate database run by the private company Vigilant Solutions, which receives images and GPS coordinates from cameras on tow trucks, repossession vehicles and police vehicles. A repossession vehicle had photographed the Yukon’s plate, which led the inspector to Yang’s residence. Yang entered a conditional guilty plea and appealed the denial of his motion to suppress.

What the court held

In an opinion by Judge Piersol, the panel affirmed. It held that Yang had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the Yukon’s historical location data after failing to return it by the due date, where the rental company had no policy or practice of letting renters keep cars late and simply charging them, and therefore that he lacked standing to challenge the warrantless database search.

Judge Bea concurred in the judgment but disagreed on standing. He would have affirmed on the ground that the database search “did not reveal the whole of the defendant’s physical movements,” and so didn’t infringe a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Why it matters for license plate readers

Yang is one of the few federal appellate decisions about a police search of ALPR data. It shows two separate hurdles in an ALPR challenge: standing, which the majority relied on, and whether the search revealed enough to be a search, which Judge Bea relied on.

It also shows that ALPR data doesn’t come only from police cameras. Here, the key image came from a private repossession vehicle. See private, business and HOA cameras.

What it didn’t decide

• Whether a warrantless search of an ALPR database is a Fourth Amendment search for someone lawfully driving a vehicle. The majority resolved the case on standing.
• How Byrd v. United States (2018), on unlisted rental drivers, applies to overdue rentals. The Yang opinion doesn’t cite Byrd.
• Anything binding outside the Ninth Circuit.

Later history

The panel affirmed the district court. We have not identified later proceedings altering the decision, and we don’t have access to a commercial citator.