## Facts

- Pennsylvania prosecutors charged Carol Lee Walker in state court with forgery and computer crimes arising from an investigation involving her husband’s trucking business.
- Senior Deputy Attorney General Brian T. Coffey prosecuted the case, and Special Agent Paul Zimmerer investigated.
- Coffey and Zimmerer sought Walker’s work emails from her Pennsylvania State University employee email account.
- Penn State refused an informal request and asked for a subpoena.
- Coffey and Zimmerer obtained and served a subpoena that was facially incomplete (missing required information such as the production date/time/place and the requesting party) and conceded to be unenforceable.
- Penn State’s assistant general counsel reviewed the subpoena and directed a university employee to produce the requested emails.
- After the emails were produced, the criminal charges against Walker were dismissed with prejudice.
- Walker sued Coffey and Zimmerer, first asserting a Fourth Amendment theory, then amending to assert Stored Communications Act (SCA) claims after the Fourth Amendment case was dismissed and affirmed on appeal.

## Issues

1. Whether the SCA applies when government officials obtain an employee’s work emails from an employer’s internal email system that is not offered “to the public.”
2. Whether, given an earlier appellate determination that the employer voluntarily disclosed the emails, Walker could plausibly allege an SCA violation based on the officials’ use of an invalid subpoena to obtain the disclosure.

## Decision

- The Third Circuit affirmed dismissal of Walker’s amended complaint.
- The court held the SCA was inapplicable because Penn State did not provide electronic communication services to the public.
- The court treated it as settled (law of the case) that Penn State voluntarily consented to disclose the emails, defeating any theory of nonconsensual access or compelled disclosure under the SCA.
- Although the subpoena was unenforceable, its invalidity did not convert Penn State’s voluntary production, from its own system, into an SCA violation.
- Because no statutory violation was stated, the court did not need to rely on qualified immunity to affirm.

## Legal Principles

- The SCA’s core protections for stored communications apply in relevant part to facilities through which an electronic communication service is provided to the public; an employer’s internal, employee-only email system falls outside that category.
- When an employer that owns and operates the email system voluntarily accesses and produces emails from its own servers, that conduct is not prohibited by the SCA on the theory that the employer (or the requesting officials) “accessed” a protected facility “without authorization.”
- Under the law-of-the-case doctrine, a prior appellate determination that a custodian voluntarily consented to disclosure forecloses repleading the same disclosure as unauthorized or nonconsensual for a different legal theory based on the same events.
- The use of a facially invalid or unenforceable subpoena, without more, does not establish an SCA violation where the records holder is outside the SCA’s covered provider category and voluntarily discloses the communications.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit held that Walker failed to state a claim under the Stored Communications Act because Penn State’s internal employee email system was not a public electronic communication service and, in any event, Penn State’s voluntary disclosure of Walker’s work emails—already established in prior litigation—prevented characterizing the production as unauthorized access or compelled disclosure under the SCA.


Walker v. Coffey, 956 F.3d 163 (3d Cir. 2020)