United States v. Jones Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

United States v. Jones (2012) is a U.S. Supreme Court case requiring police to obtain a warrant when a global positioning system (GPS) tracking device is used to watch the movements of a suspect. All nine justices agreed that a warrant was needed in this case, but they did not all agree as to why. Some questions were left open for future debate. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure by police, requiring them to get a warrant prior to searching or seizing property. Asked to decide if this requirement applied to the installation of a GPS device on a suspect’s vehicle, the Supreme Court was unanimous in its opinion that a warrant was needed; however, the reasoning for the opinion was divided 5–4.

For many years, the court had relied upon a trespass to indicate whether a search had occurred. Without a physical trespass, the court had held that no search occurred. This changed in 1967 in the case Katz v. United States, in which police had attached a listening device to the outside of a telephone booth to listen to a bookie making illegal bets. The Supreme Court in Katz ruled that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places, meaning that a physical trespass was not required for an illegal search to have occurred. From the Katz decision emerged the test for reasonable expectation of privacy: Does the individual have a reasonable expectation of privacy that society is willing to recognize?

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in Jones, held that the government’s installation of a GPS tracking device on the defendant’s car was a search within the Fourth Amendment because it was a physical invasion of private property for the purposes of obtaining information, and would have been recognized as a violation at the time of the amendment’s adoption in 1791. The majority of the justices did not rely on the Katz decision in determining the Jones case. The U.S. government had argued under Katz that a warrant was not required in this case because there is no expectation of privacy as to where a car goes because the car is exposed to the public. However, the majority dismissed this claim, maintaining that Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights were not attached to the Katz argument.

The majority argued that the historical reliance on a trespass was not repudiated by the Katz decision; instead, Katz merely added to that understanding. By adding to the understanding of physical trespass as an illegal search, the majority did not apply the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test because it is not necessary to find the GPS tracking as a search when prior reliance on trespass produces the same result. Simply put, when the government physically invades personal property to gather information, a search occurs.

In an opinion concurring in the judgment, Justice Samuel Alito used a different rationale for finding the use of a GPS device without a warrant a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Alito framed the issue as whether Jones’s reasonable expectation of privacy was violated by the long-term monitoring of his car’s movements. This framing of the issue aligns nicely with the Katz test for personal privacy. The concurring opinion states that the Katz test did not augment the trespass approach as the majority believed, but that the trespass approach was replaced by the Katz test for privacy.

By applying the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test, the concurring justices reached the same conclusion that the use of GPS monitoring without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. However, the concurrence identified a time issue that may change the ultimate outcome—a short-term monitoring versus a long-term monitoring. Alito did not expand upon this issue because he believed that a case involving four weeks of monitoring was clearly unreasonable.

In the end, Justice Sonia Sotomayor may have held the key swing vote on this issue. While the justices disagreed as to the reasoning behind the ruling, Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion in which she seemed to be supportive of both viewpoints. She joined the majority opinion finding the placing of the GPS device to be a trespass search within the Fourth Amendment. However, she also agreed with Alito’s statement that the long-term monitoring of Jones’s car was a violation of his expectation of privacy. This means that five justices agreed that the attaching and monitoring of a GPS device is a search, and five justices agreed that long-term monitoring of GPS is a violation of the reasonable expectation of privacy.

This potentially creates a case in which the government attaches a GPS device for only short-term monitoring that may not require a warrant if Sotomayor abandons the trespass test in favor of the Katz privacy test favored by Alito’s concurrence. However, Sotomayor believed that the resolution of this issue and others is unnecessary in the present case because the government did trespass on Jones’s property, which is a narrower ground for deciding this case.

Many times the Supreme Court makes its rulings based on the narrowest grounds possible so as not to overreach into areas that have not appeared before the court. The majority recognized that its holding in Jones leaves room for future cases to be argued about GPS tracking for short periods of time and other complications. There is considerable debate over what the court’s decision in Jones means for police and the government in the near future. While a majority of the court held that placing and monitoring a GPS device was a search, the court did not address the government’s claim that it was a reasonable search not requiring a warrant. The issue was considered forfeited because it was not raised in the court of appeals. The inference here is that if the placing of the GPS device is not reasonable, then a warrant is needed. There most likely will be future cases to settle these unresolved issues, but for the foreseeable future it appears that warrants will be required for police to install and monitor a GPS device on a suspect’s personal property.

Bibliography:

Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S., 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012).

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