Police GPSSupreme Court rules against GPS tracking

On Monday, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruledthat law enforcement agencies needed a judge’s approval before using GPS technology to track a suspect.

In a unanimous ruling, all nine justices agreed that GPS surveillance violated constitutional rights, foreshadowing future decisions limiting police use of long-term around the clock electronic surveillance.

“The Supreme Court’s decision is an important one because it sends a message that technological advances cannot outpace the American Constitution,” explained Donald Tibbs, a law professor at Drexel University. “The people will retain certain rights even when technology changes how the police are able to conduct their investigations.”

The ruling stems from a case involving Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner suspected of selling illicit drugs. To gather evidence against Jones, Washington, D.C. police placed a GPS tracker on his vehicle without his knowledge, but did so outside of the terms of the warrant it had received.

The judge stipulated that the police must place the GPS tracker within ten days and only in the District of Columbia. Law enforcement officers did not install the device until the eleventh day, while Jones’s car was parked in Maryland.

Jones was eventually convicted of trafficking cocaine and sentenced to life in prison based on evidence collected using the GPS tracker, which was in place for four weeks.

His case was appealed on the constitutional grounds that police had violated his rights to privacy and that the GPS tracker was unreasonable search and seizure.

Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor,ruled that installing a GPS device on a suspect’s vehicle was the equivalent of a search, which meant that a warrant was required.

“Officers encroached on a protected area,” Scalia wrote, and without a valid warrant, police had conducted an illegal search.

All nine justices agreed that the search was in violation of the Fourth Amendment, but Justice Alito, in a concurring opinionjoined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan, went even further and argued that police had violated the suspect’s expectation of privacy and the duration of surveillance.

“The use of longer-term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy,” Alito wrote.

All nine justices disagreed with the government’s argument that Jones had no expectation of privacy since his vehicle was parked on a public road.