High court: warrant needed for GPS tracking
23 January 2012 | 
Author: Professor |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.
The
ruling represents a serious complication for law enforcement
nationwide, which increasingly relies on high tech surveillance of
suspects, including the use of various types of GPS technology. A GPS device installed
by police on Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones' Jeep
helped them link him to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs.
He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned
the conviction. Associate Justice Antonin
Scalia said that the government's installation of a GPS device, and its
use to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a search, meaning
that a warrant is required. "By attaching the
device to the Jeep" that Jones was using, "officers encroached on a
protected area," Scalia wrote. He concluded that the installation of the
device on the vehicle without a warrant was a trespass and therefore an
illegal search. All nine justices agreed that
the GPS monitoring on the Jeep violated the Fourth Amendment's
protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Scalia
wrote the main opinion of three in the case. He was joined by Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and
Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor also wrote one of the two concurring opinions that agreed with the outcome in the Jones case for different reasons. Justice
Samuel Alito wrote, in the other concurring opinion, that the trespass
was not as important as the suspect's expectation of privacy and that
the long-term duration of the surveillance impinged on that expectation
of privacy. Police monitored the Jeep's movements over the course of
four weeks after attaching the GPS device. "The
use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses
impinges on expectations of privacy," Alito wrote in an opinion joined
by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.
Sotomayor in her concurring opinion specifically said she agreed with
Alito on this conclusion. Alito added, "We
need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this
vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the
four-week mark." Regarding the issue of
duration, Scalia wrote that "we may have to grapple" with those issues
in the future, "but there is no reason for rushing forward to resolve
them here." Alito also said the court should
address how expectations of privacy affect whether warrants are required
for remote surveillance using electronic methods that do not require
the police to install equipment, such as GPS tracking of mobile
telephones. A federal appeals court in
Washington had overturned Jones's drug conspiracy conviction because
police did not have a warrant when they installed a GPS device on his
vehicle and then tracked his movements for a month. The Supreme Court
agreed with the appeals court. The case is U.S. v. Jones, 10-1259. (original link)
