PA Supreme Court: Telephones Exempt from Wiretap Act

 The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled recently that a state trooper did not violate the Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act when he instructed an informant to set up a drug deal with the defendant on speakerphone and then eavesdropped on the conversation. The Court held that telephones are expressly exempt from the devices prohibited by the act  regardless of how they’re used, reported The Legal Intelligencer.
In Commonwealth v. Spence, the court unanimously reversed a state Superior Court decision that had affirmed a Delaware County trial judge’s ruling suppressing evidence obtained when the trooper listened in on the phone call.
The Wiretap Act bars the interception of “any wire, electronic or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical or other device.”
The act does, however, provide an exception for communications intercepted by “any telephone ... furnished to the subscriber or user by a provider of wire or electronic communication service in the ordinary course of its business, or furnished by such subscriber or user for connection to the facilities of such service and used in the ordinary course of its business, or being used by a communication common carrier in the ordinary course of its business, or by an investigative or law enforcement officer in the ordinary course of his duties.”
Justice Seamus P. McCaffery, writing for the high court said the statutory language of the act is clear that telephones are specifically excluded from the definition of “device” and that no further distinction is necessary.
“The cellphone over which the trooper heard the conversations between the arrestee and appellee clearly was a telephone furnished to the subscriber or user by a provider of wire or electronic communication service in the ordinary course of its business,” McCaffery said. “The language of the statute states that telephones are exempt from the definition of device; the language of the statute does not state that it is the use to which the telephone is being put which determines if it is considered a device.”
McCaffery was joined by Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille and Justices Thomas G. Saylor, J. Michael Eakin, Max Baer, Debra Todd and Correale F. Stevens.
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