A Texas man’s 60-year sentence is now a test of whether police need a warrant for license-plate camera data

Charles Brownlee, a Texas man serving a 60-year prison sentence for armed robbery, is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to throw out his conviction because police searched a license-plate camera database without a warrant. The panel heard argument on Oct. 5, 2026, and has not ruled. No deadline for a decision has been set.

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Prosecutors tied Brownlee to five armed robberies around the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2024. The question now before the appeals court is narrower than guilt, and it carries consequences for every driver who passes a plate-reading camera: whether pulling a vehicle’s travel history from a network of roadside cameras counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment.

How Flock data led investigators to Brownlee

According to Carscoops’ account of the case, investigators searched the Flock database for vehicles that matched eyewitness descriptions of the getaway car. They identified an SUV seen near several robbery scenes and then used the system to find it. The searchable records include vehicle descriptions and identifying details, not only photographs of plates.

The Texas Tribune reported that police built what the defense calls a pattern of life from Brownlee’s travels on monitored North Texas roads, and that the SUV belonged to his sister. He was a passenger, not the owner or driver. Flock’s software logs vehicles passing an estimated 13,000 cameras in Texas, and officers can search data compiled by other departments. Before trial Brownlee asked the court to bar prosecutors from using the data, and U.S. District Judge Terry Means denied the motion.

The warrant argument before the Fifth Circuit

Assistant Federal Public Defender Matthew Wright told the panel that Flock lets police reconstruct a person’s movements, and that the search therefore required a judge-approved warrant. Courthouse News reported that Wright distinguished Flock’s retrospective tracking from a human reading plates on the street, something he said a person could do unaided. The Texas Tribune added that Wright called the network more inescapable than cell phone tracking, which the U.S. Supreme Court has treated as protected, and noted that police located the target in about two and a half hours.

Justice Department attorney Michael Weisbuch argued that Flock data is “episodic”: individual photographs of cars on public roads, where drivers have no expectation of privacy. Prosecutors also contend that Brownlee cannot challenge the search because he neither owned nor drove the vehicle, and that other evidence, including surveillance footage and cell phone data, was equally useful in identifying him. Weisbuch told the court the question of how many cameras amount to constant surveillance belongs to legislators.

Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, who presided over a panel that also included Judges Irma Carrillo Ramirez and Priscilla Richman, pressed the government on that point. Courthouse News said she asked whether the rule that publicly observable movements are unprotected still holds “in this day and age,” and what happens when cameras are on every corner. Carscoops reported that she questioned how the government’s reasoning would survive wider camera coverage.

Conflicting rulings on plate-reader searches

The appeal does not arrive on a blank slate. In United States v. Porter, decided March 17, 2026, a different Fifth Circuit panel held that a license-plate-reader system “did not invade any reasonable expectation of privacy and did not constitute a search, so no warrant was required.” That opinion compared the system to the beeper tracking in an earlier Supreme Court case rather than to cell-site location records, and reasoned that the system provides “only periodic information about a vehicle’s location,” and it did not name Flock.

A federal judge in Oklahoma went the other way four days before Brownlee’s argument. On Oct. 1, 2026, U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill ruled in United States v. Kyle that a deputy’s warrantless query of a vehicle’s historical location records was an unconstitutional search, calling the technology “indiscriminate mass surveillance.” She suppressed the Flock records and the evidence from the later vehicle search, including about 91 pounds of methamphetamine. A legal commentary on the ruling reports that Flock, which was not a party, disputed the decision and expects an appeal.

Legislators are watching as well. The Texas Tribune reported that state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst plans to file bills restricting or banning Flock and similar plate readers in the 2027 session, and that U.S. Rep. Keith Self has proposed a federal bill requiring warrants before federal agencies access Flock data. Brownlee’s sentence stands while the Fifth Circuit weighs the case. Whatever the panel decides, it will have to reconcile the government’s view of Flock as a series of isolated snapshots with the defense’s view of it as a searchable record of a person’s routines, and it will have to decide whether Brownlee, as a passenger, can raise the question at all.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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