Antoine Jones

In a case that stemmed from an investigation by D.C. police and the FBI of a local drug dealer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that police across the country need a warrant if they want to track suspects using GPS monitors.

In the ruling, which was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court found that even though the case involved a GPS unit that was attached to a car that was out in the open, it still constituted a “search” under the language of the Fourth Amendment:

It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.

The case grew out of a 2005-2005 investigation into Antoine Jones, a D.C. club owner who was suspected of drug trafficking. As part of the investigation, police were given the green light to place a GPS tracker on Jones’ car within 10 days and inside city limits. The GPS tracker was placed outside of the city and the time-limit allowed by the warrant, but Jones was still arrested after he led police to a Maryland stash house in which they found cocaine, crack and $850,000 in cash. Jones was later convicted for conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs.

Jones appealed the conviction, saying that the use of GPS on his car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. On August 6, 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with him, overturning his conviction. Beyond the issue of the GPS being placed on Jones’ car outside of the scope of the warrant, the court found that “prolonged GPS monitoring reveals an intimate picture of the subject’s life that he expects no one to have — short perhaps of his spouse.”

In today’s decision, the Supreme Court sustained the lower court’s opinion.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “The Government usurped Jones’ property for the purpose of conducting surveillance on him, thereby invading privacy interests long afforded, and undoubtedly entitled to, Fourth Amendment protection.”

In his own concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said that while short-term searches may be permissible, the extent of the GPS monitoring Jones was subjected to made it qualify as a search:

[T]he use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period. In this case, for four weeks, law enforcement agents tracked every movement that respondent made in the vehicle he was driving. We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark.

It goes without saying that this case would never have come to be had the GPS tracker been placed on Jones’ car a day earlier and within city limits.

Jones Case