South Carolina License Plate Reader Laws

Status at a glance

Indirect sources only

We found no South Carolina statute, appellate decision or verified agency policy that deals with license plate readers. This page rests on two indirect sources: a 2025 Supreme Court of South Carolina decision about cell-phone location data, and a 2001 decision about the state constitution’s privacy clause. Neither involves ALPRs. Neither tells you how a South Carolina court would treat ALPR evidence.

ALPR bills that haven’t passed

Three 2025–2026 bills on license plate readers appear on the General Assembly’s site. None has become law.

• S. 447 was introduced on March 12, 2025. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported it favorably on April 9, 2026. The bill page says it is “Currently residing in the Senate.”
• H. 3155 was referred to the House Judiciary Committee on January 14, 2025.
• H. 4013 was referred to the House Committee on Education and Public Works on February 13, 2025, and is “Currently residing in the House.”

Because they aren’t law, this page doesn’t describe what the bills would require. We also checked Title 23, Chapter 1 of the South Carolina Code and found no ALPR section.

State v. Carter: cell-site location, not ALPR

State v. Carter, Op. No. 28257, filed January 29, 2025, is not an ALPR case. Officers obtained a suspect’s real-time cell-site location information from his cell-service provider, without a warrant, to find him. Carter argued that violated his federal and state constitutional rights.

The court didn’t decide whether there was a constitutional violation. It affirmed “because—even if there was a constitutional violation, which we do not address—the officers clearly acted in good faith reliance on a federal statute that specifically permitted their actions.” It held “the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule forecloses suppression when officers acted pursuant to this explicit federal statutory authority in obtaining real-time, cell-site location information.”

The court also noted that Carter hadn’t argued to the trial court that the warrantless request violated the “unreasonable invasions of privacy” provision in article I, section 10. So Carter says nothing about that clause. It is one example of a South Carolina court applying the good-faith exception to location evidence. It doesn’t address ALPR data. See Carpenter v. United States for the federal cell-site case.

State v. Forrester: article I, section 10

Article I, section 10 of the South Carolina Constitution protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures and unreasonable invasions of privacy.” In State v. Forrester, Op. No. 25247 (2001), a consent-search case, the court said it “can interpret the state protection against unreasonable searches and seizures in such a way as to provide greater protection than the federal Constitution.” It added that the state constitution “favors an interpretation offering a higher level of privacy protection than the Fourth Amendment.”

Two limits matter. First, on the question actually decided, the court held that while the state constitution “may provide a higher level of protection in the search and seizure context, it does not go so far as to require informed consent prior to government searches.” Second, a separate opinion disagreed with what it called “dicta in the majority opinion concerning the significance of the right to privacy provision.” No South Carolina court has applied Forrester to ALPRs, as far as we found. See is ALPR a search?

What this can mean in a South Carolina case

• Which agency’s cameras captured the data, and does that agency have a written ALPR policy on retention and sharing?
• Was the article I, section 10 privacy argument raised in the trial court? Carter notes it hadn’t been.
• What authority did officers rely on to search stored ALPR data, and how might the good-faith exception be argued? See grounds to suppress ALPR evidence.
• Did officers search location history over time? See the mosaic theory.