The US government has been trying to make a case for GPS tracking on a suspects vehicle without a warrant for some time. The Supreme Court has finally weighed in on the issue and that decision did not come down on the favorable side for the government.
The Supreme Court decision, which was unanimous, was that Fourth Amendment protection of “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” would be directly violated if GPS tracking without a warrant was allowed. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chief Justice John Roberts voted with that specific justification in mind.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Samuel Alito felt that tracking without a warrant would violate a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Either way all of the judges felt that a warrant was absolutely necessary if a suspect’s vehicle was to be tracked via GPS.
The Obama administration is expected to be unhappy about this decision, considering their stance on the issue from the beginning was that a warrant shouldn’t be necessary to track the vehicle of a suspect.
All of this started during a District of Columbia case in which police used a GPS tracking device on the vehicle of suspected cocaine dealer, Antoine Jones. Jones was convicted but the case was thrown out by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That appeals court decided that GPS tracking should require a warrant, which was never obtained.
Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote,
"A reasonable person does not expect anyone to monitor and retain a record of every time he drives his car, including his origin, route, destination, and each place he stops and how long he stays there; rather, he expects each of those movements to remain 'disconnected and anonymous.’”
This decision will have an interesting effect on the way police monitor suspects. It was brought up during the hearings for this case that police are using GPS tracking on suspect vehicles thousands of times a year to gather information for their investigations. This will force police to obtain a warrant for each instance of this tracking which prosecutors argued would “seriously impedes the government's use of GPS devices at the beginning stages of an investigation when officers are gathering evidence to establish probable cause."
