GPS Tracking Needs Warrant |
“police violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches by
tracking his movements 24 hours a day for four weeks with a
GPS device they had installed on his Jeep without a valid warrant”
GPS Trackers and the Fourth Amendment
Tampa Drug Charge Defense Lawyer, Attorney W.F. “Casey” Ebsary, Jr. reviewed an interesting appeals court decision where police put a GPS Tracking Device on a car and followed him for weeks. The defendant was arrested for Federal cocaine charges. Specifically, “conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute five or more kilograms of cocaine and 50 or more grams of cocaine base.” The court summarized the case as involving “Evidence Obtained from GPS Device.”
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On a side note, California, has made it illegal for anyone except law enforcement to use a GPS to determine the location or movement of a person. In some jurisdictions, GPS tracking of a person’s location without that person’s knowledge is a violation of an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy.” Some law enforcement agencies use “darts” a miniaturized GPS receiver, radio transmitter, and battery embedded in a sticky compound material. Cops shoot the darts at a vehicle and it sticks to the target tracking begins.
The Court further held “the whole of a person‘s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood a stranger would observe all those movements is not just remote, it is essentially nil. It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even to follow someone during a single journey as he goes to the market or returns home from work. It is another thing entirely for that stranger to pick up the scent again the next day and the day after that, week in and week out, dogging his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.”
The appeal centered on defense arguments that “his conviction should be overturned because the police violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches by tracking his movements 24 hours a day for four weeks with a GPS device they had installed on his Jeep without a valid warrant. We consider first whether that use of the device was a search and then, having concluded it was, consider whether it was reasonable and whether any error was harmless.” The court ruled that tracking with GPS was a search. A Search Warrant was required.
The complete opinion is a free download here.
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