The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that the use of a GPS device to monitor one suspect's car over a long period of time qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment -- an outcome that could have legal ripple effects on law enforcement reliance on location tracking for investigations.Unanimously. That qualifies as a beatdown.
The decision came in the case of United States v. Jones, a fight between suspect Antoine Jones and federal prosecutors over evidence that investigators obtained while building a case against him on drug trafficking and other charges.
The federal government argued it could track for 28 days a vehicle Jones used -- even though investigators' initial warrant expired and the tracker had been installed out of state -- because Jones traveled on public roads.
I wonder if they would argue so forcefully in front of Washington and Jefferson.
I wonder if they would argue so forcefully if it was Maxine Waters' car...
That argument had split lower courts, but the justices on Monday held that the government's actions ultimately constituted a search requiring a warrant. All nine justices agreed, albeit with different justifications. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion.
The case had been widely regarded as a major legal test of electronic surveillance and digital privacy. It hands a key defeat to the Obama administration, as lawyers at the Justice Department have defended vigorously their use of location tracking writ large.
In 2004, the FBI and D.C. police began investigating Jones, a night club owner, for trafficking narcotics. Authorities applied in 2005, before a D.C. court, to track the car owned by Jones's wife. According to the court, the warrant was issued with a 10-day time horizon.
But authorities did not install it until the 11th day, and they did it outside of Washington, D.C. They ultimately tracked Jones's movements for 28 days, collecting evidence that led to a number of charges on possession and more. With Jones facing a life sentence, a legal battle ensued over whether the GPS evidence was admissible in those proceedings. The Supreme Court took the case last year.
In arguments, the government contended that vehicles traveling on public roads lack a reasonable expectation of privacy, relying on a 1983 case involving the placement of a so-called beeper in a container that police tracked. But the argument was met with skepticism before the court, which noted the great advances in location tracking technology in over two decades.