Inmate botches Zaxby’s robbery, but makes history in SC Supreme Court ruling on GPS

Donte Samar Brown messed up while robbing a Zaxby’s and is spending the next 45 years in a South Carolina prison. He won’t get out until he’s 75.

But Brown, 30, has made legal history. This week, the S.C. Supreme Court used his case to issue a landmark ruling on how Global Positioning System evidence should be introduced in South Carolina trials.

These days, just about everyone — from airline pilots to the military to hikers to motorists — uses GPS technology to get around.

But it turns out that in South Carolina, there was no generally accepted way to present that scientific evidence to a jury.

At Brown’s 2014 trial, prosecutors introduced crucial GPS evidence that placed Brown and another man at the Zaxby’s around the time of the robbery. But the prosecutors did it in a casual, offhand way, and the high court ruled unanimously that was not good enough for the jury.

The “general acceptance of GPS technology does not ... translate to the State getting a pass from making a minimum showing that the GPS records it seeks to introduce into evidence are accurate,” Associate Justice John Kittredge wrote in the Wednesday opinion.

At Brown’s trial, a state law enforcement officer testified how GPS information from an ankle monitoring device helped place Brown and the other man at the robbery. The other man wore the ankle monitor, and other evidence placed Brown with him at that time.

The prosecutor asked the agent, Stewart Powell, “Is that information accurate?”

Powell, of the S.C. Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole Services, told the jury, “It is very accurate. We use it in court all the time.”

But that is hardly sufficient, the high court ruled. Instead, a witness offering GPS data must explain to the jury how the system works, how it obtains its data and how it is known to be accurate.

GPS is a government-maintained, satellite-based system that provides precise time and location information around the planet. It is all but indispensable in modern life. Among its uses in the criminal justice field: ankle-tracking devices for defendants out on bond.

“Agent Powell failed to properly authenticate the accuracy of GPS records,” the opinion said, calling it an “error” to put the evidence before the jury.

The Supreme Court cited a North Carolina case as a model for how South Carolina prosecutors should introduce GPS evidence.

In the North Carolina case, the officer told the jury about the components of the GPS machine, explained how it used a combination of GPS signals and cellphone triangulations to update the location every four minutes and showed how that data was uploaded and stored. The officer finished by saying the device was accurate, “usually within four to 10 meters.”

Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, whose office prosecuted Brown’s case, praised the guidance given by the Supreme Court.

The North Carolina case “is very clear and well-reasoned,” Wilson said. “It should be easy to follow .... Having the Court’s endorsement of (that) case will be helpful moving forward.”

Although allowing the GPS testimony into Brown’s case was an error, it didn’t affect his conviction, the high court ruled. There was so much other overwhelming evidence of Brown’s guilt — including DNA evidence, cellphone evidence and items recovered at Brown’s house from the crime scene — that the Supreme Court upheld the conviction.

Previously, Brown might only have been remembered for his convictions on numerous counts of kidnapping and armed robbery at that Zaxby’s in Goose Greek.

But now, Brown can take comfort in his role in clarifying a complex legal issue that likely will lead to the convictions of more people like him.

This story was originally published August 31, 2018 at 9:59 AM.