Wells v. State

• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
• Citation: Wells v. State, 714 S.W.3d 614 (Tex. Crim. App. 2025)
• Docket Number: PD-0669-23
• Decision Date: 02 April 2025
• Parties: Aaron Rayshan WELLS, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas

714 S.W.3d 614

Aaron Rayshan WELLS, Appellant

v.The STATE of Texas

No. PD-0669-23

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

FILED: April 2, 2025

On Appellant’s Petition for Discretionary Review From the Fifth Court of Appeals Dallas County

Joshua Vanderslice, for State.

Christina Dean, for Appellant.

Yeary, J., announced the judgment of the Court and filed an opinion in which Keel, Finley, and Parker, JJ., joined.

[1] This case involves a question about the constitutionality of a “geofence” warrant.¹

We conclude that use of the geofence warrant in this case to obtain location history data did not violate the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.² Accordingly, the judgment of the court of appeals is affirmed.

I.The Offense

Jimmy Giddings was a drug dealer. He lived with his girlfriend, Nikita Dickerson, at a house at 4923 Veterans Drive in Dallas, across the street from Carver Heights Baptist Church. Dickerson and Giddings had a routine. When he returned home in the early morning hours, she would unlock the gate at their front door and greet him in the driveway. She would carry a .40 caliber Glock pistol because, while they lived in a nice house, she felt the neighborhood was unsafe.

At around 3 a.m. on the morning of the offense, June 24, 2018, Dickerson exited the gate outside the front door, as captured on the home’s front-door security camera, pursuant to her and Giddings’ routine. Security cameras from the church across the street recorded four men who had been loitering in the parking lot on the far side of the church from Veteran’s Drive “for some hours” before the offense. When Giddings arrived home, the four men, wearing masks over their lower faces, rushed across the street toward Giddings and Dickerson brandishing pistols and a rifle.

In the melee that followed, Dickerson sustained five non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. She also dropped her pistol, and it was retrieved by one of the masked men. At the same time, Giddings fled into the house. Two of the assailants rushed in after him, and a third assailant marched the wounded Dickerson into the house at gunpoint. The fourth man, who turned out to be Appellant, quickly followed them.

All the men except for Appellant had visibly distinctive tattoos. Once inside, during the robbery, one of the assailants—the record does not definitively establish which one—shot Giddings in the neck, severing his spine. As a result of this gunshot wound, Giddings died.

Afterwards, the assailants fled back across the street to their vehicle in the church parking lot and drove off. As described by the court of appeals:

Based on the security camera recording timestamp and footage showing that the men were in the area of the church immediately before and after the offense, [police] obtained a warrant to search Google’s records for information on devices located within a rectangular geofence encompassing [Giddings and Dickerson’s] house and the portion of the church directly across the street between 2:45 a.m. and 3:10 a.m. on June 24. Ultimately, a cellular phone associated with [A]ppellant was identified as being at the scene. Through [A]ppellant’sphone records and a search of social media, police were able to identify Milton Prentice, Brian Groom, and Kiante Watkins as the other three men involved in the offense.

Wells, 675 S.W.3d at 819. Watkins testified as an accomplice witness against Appellant at trial, describing the robbery in some detail.

Appellant was charged with and convicted of the capital murder—during the course of a robbery—of Jimmy Giddings. Tex. Penal Code § 19.03(a)(2). Because the State did not seek the death penalty, Appellant received an automatic sentence of life without parole, without the necessity of a punishment hearing. Tex. Penal Code § 12.31(a)(2).

II. Background

A. The Geofence Warrant

The warrant at issue in this case was directed to “Google LLC[.]” It ordered Google to turn over to the police “GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth sourced location history data” corresponding to “Initial Search Parameters” generated from devices that Google’s electronic records showed to have been within certain, particularly circumscribed time and location specifications.³ The warrant required disclosure in three steps.

In Step One, the warrant commanded, “[f]or each location point within the ‘Initial Search Parameters’, Google shall produce anonymized information specifying the corresponding unique device ID, timestamp, coordinates, display radius, and data source, if available (the ‘Anonymized List’)[.]” Police were then to “analyze this location data to identify users who may have witnessed or participated” in the capital offense and “seek any additional information regarding these devices from Google.”

In Step Two, the warrant provided that, “[f]or those accounts identified as relevant to the ongoing investigation through analysis of’ the Anonymized List, Google “shall provide additional location history outside of the predefined area for those relevant accounts to determine path of travel.” It then specified that, “[t]his additional location history shall not exceed 60 minutes plus or minus the first and last timestamp associated with the account in the initial dataset.” This step was intended to aid the police in ruling out any devices flagged by the Anonymized List so that the identity of obvious non-witnesses and non-participants would not be revealed.

Finally, in Step Three, the warrant ordered that, “[f]or those accounts identified as relevant to the ongoing investigation through an analysis of provided records, and upon demand,” Google “shall provide the subscriber’s information for those relevant accounts to include, subscriber’s name, email address, services subscribed to, last 6 months of IP history, SMS account number, and registration IP.”⁴ In other words, only in the last step was sufficient information revealed permitting law enforcement to identify witnesses to, or participants in, the capital offense under investigation. At no point during this three-step process were police required to return to the magistrate for incremental authorization.

B. The Warrant Affidavit

The warrant affidavit started out by providing the “Initial Search Parameters”: a “[g]eographical area identified as a polygon defined by” four “latitude/longitude coordinates and connected by straight lines[,]” as specified.⁵ The affidavit sought “GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth sourced location history data from devices that reported a location” within the described polygon at a window of time within which the capital murder occurred, namely: “June 24, 2018 0245 hrs (2:45 a.m.) to June 24, 2018 0310 hrs (3:10 a.m.) Central Time Zone[.]” Thus, the affidavit sought location history data for an area that encompassed no more than a part of the church and the church grounds, including the parking lot where the assailants waited, a small segment of Veterans Drive between the church and the house at 4923 Veterans Drive, and the house itself, including front and back yards, for a twenty-five minute interval corresponding to the approximate time of the offense.

In a portion of the warrant affidavit explaining “Google Location Services and Relevant Technology[,]” the affiant, Detective Jeffrey Loeb, explained:

Google has developed an operating system for mobile devices, including cellular phones, known as Android, that has a proprietary operating system. Nearly every cellular phone using the Android operating system has an associated Google account, and users are prompted to add a Google account when they first turn on a new Android device. Based on my training and experience, I have learned that Google collects and retains location data from Android-enabled mobile devices when a Google account user has enabled Google location services. Google can also collect location data from non-Android devices if the device is registered to a Google account and the user has location services enabled. The company uses this information for location-based advertising and location based search results. This location information is derived from GPS data, cell site/cell tower information, and Wi-Fi access points.

In a portion of the affidavit styled “Probable Cause Statement[,]” Loeb next narrated the facts of the offense essentially as described above, concluding with the assertion that:

[i]t is likely that at least one of the four suspects who committed this offense had an Android device on him during the commission of this offense. It is common practice that home invasion robbery suspects keep an open line with someone outside of the residence while committing this type of offense to keep an eye out for responding police officers.

Loeb also averred that he was:

also familiar with Android based cellular devices reporting detailed location information to Google where the electronic data is then stored. This information is captured and recorded even when the user is not doing any specific action on the device. As a result, Affiant is requesting a list of any Google devices in a geographic area around the address of 4923 Veterans Drive, Dallas, Texas 75241 in Dallas County, Texas to help identify the suspects in this capital murder investigation.

The warrant affidavit concluded with a description of the three-step process by which Google releases information in response to geofence warrants, as depicted in the warrant itself and as described above.

C. Execution of the Warrant

The warrant was signed by a district court judge on December 7, 2018.⁶ Pursuant to Step One of the procedure, as outlined in both the warrant and the warrant affidavit, Google identified three devices within the geofence. Once the search was expanded via Step Two, Leob was able to determine that one of those three devices belonged to an individual who was involved in the offense. Step Three revealed that Appellant was that individual. From there, by separate warrants, Loeb was able to obtain Appellant’s Google account information plus additional...