The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday the authorities need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move.
The decision in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position. The government had told the high court that it could affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant.
“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.
In a footnote, Scalia added that, “Whatever new methods of investigation may be devised, our task, at a minimum, is to decide whether the action in question would have constituted a ‘search’ within the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred.”
In all, five justices said physically attaching the GPS device to the underside of a car amounted to trespassing and was a search requiring a warrant. The majority said “the present case does not require us to answer” whether police may employ GPS monitoring of a vehicle via an already onboard navigation system “without an accompanying trespass.”
Four justices, however, said the prolonged GPS surveillance in this case — a month — amounted to a search requiring a warrant. But the minority opinion was silent on whether GPS monitoring for shorter periods would require a warrant.
All nine justices agreed to toss a District of Columbia drug dealer’s life sentence who was the subject of a warrantless, 28-day surveillance via GPS.
The justices agreed to hear the case to settle conflicting lower-court decisions — some of which ruled a warrant was necessary, while others found the government had unchecked GPS surveillance powers.
One of the Obama administration’s main arguments in support of warrantless GPS tracking was the high court’s 1983 decision in United States v. Knotts, in which the justices said it was OK for the government to use beepers known as “bird dogs” to track a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant.
In the Supreme Court case decided Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had ruled that suspected District of Columbia drug dealer Antoine Jones had his Fourth Amendment rights violated with the warrantless use of GPS attached underneath his car for a month. The lower court had reversed Jones’ conviction, saying the FBI needed a warrant to track Jones.
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4 Responses
Wow, unanimous – next thing they’ll be back to reinstating habeas corpus, innocent until proven guilty, due process, mens rea, and all the cool stuff that seems to have vanished from the legal system over the last 10 years
The article is wrong. The Court held that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle is a search, but it explicitly did NOT rule on whether the search was unreasonable. Only unreasonable searches require warrants. If this is a reasonable search then no warrant is required, and the majority opinion explicitly wrote that it was not ruling on that question.
The law enforcement community was arguing they had a right to follow anyone and everyone around to their heart’s content, with or without a reason, with no judicial supervision – and the Supreme Court help that is a violation of the Federal Constitution. For those who would be happier if America was a police state, this is a major setback.
Akuperma, nothing has happened to habeas or the presumption of innocence in the past ten years. In fact habeas has gotten stronger, since POWs never had any right to it until the Supreme Court decided otherwise a few years ago.