United States v. Jones
565 U.S. 400 (2012)
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Rule of Law:
The government's physical installation of a Global-Positioning-System (GPS) tracking device on a target's vehicle and its subsequent use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Facts:
- Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner in the District of Columbia, was the target of a narcotics trafficking investigation by a joint FBI and Metropolitan Police Department task force.
- The Government obtained a warrant authorizing the installation of a GPS tracking device on a Jeep Grand Cherokee registered to Jones's wife, which Jones was the exclusive driver of.
- The warrant authorized installation of the device in the District of Columbia within 10 days.
- On the 11th day after the warrant was issued, and in the state of Maryland, not the District of Columbia, agents installed the GPS device on the undercarriage of the Jeep while it was in a public parking lot.
- Over the next 28 days, the Government used the device to continuously track the vehicle’s movements, relaying more than 2,000 pages of locational data.
- During the surveillance period, agents had to replace the device's battery while the vehicle was parked in a different public lot in Maryland.
Procedural Posture:
- The Government obtained a multi-count indictment against Jones in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, charging him with conspiracy to distribute narcotics.
- Jones filed a pre-trial motion to suppress the evidence obtained from the GPS device.
- The District Court granted the motion in part, suppressing only the data obtained while the vehicle was parked in the garage at Jones's residence.
- Jones's first trial ended in a hung jury on the conspiracy count.
- At a second trial, the GPS data was admitted as evidence, and a jury found Jones guilty; he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
- Jones (as appellant) appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
- The Court of Appeals reversed the conviction, holding that the warrantless use of the GPS device was an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
- The United States (as petitioner) sought, and was granted, a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court of the United States.
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Issue:
Does the government's attachment of a Global-Positioning-System (GPS) device to a suspect's vehicle, and the subsequent use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements on public streets, constitute a 'search' under the Fourth Amendment?
Opinions:
Majority - Justice Scalia
Yes. The government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle and its use to monitor the vehicle’s movements constitutes a 'search' under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment protects 'persons, houses, papers, and effects' against unreasonable searches, and a vehicle is an 'effect.' The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information, which constitutes a common-law trespass. This trespassory test for a search was the standard when the Fourth Amendment was adopted and was not eliminated by the later development of the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' test in Katz v. United States. Rather, the Katz test was added to, not substituted for, the common-law trespassory test, meaning a physical intrusion on an 'effect' to gather information is a search.
Concurring - Justice Sotomayor
Yes. A search occurs, at a minimum, when the Government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area. While agreeing with the majority’s trespass-based reasoning, this concurrence emphasizes that the trespassory test may provide little guidance in cases of electronic surveillance that do not involve a physical invasion. Long-term GPS monitoring, even without a trespass, generates a comprehensive record of a person's movements and associations that can impinge on reasonable expectations of privacy. It may be necessary in the future to reconsider the premise that individuals lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties, a doctrine ill-suited for the digital age.
Concurring - Justice Alito
Yes. The lengthy monitoring in this case constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment, but the majority's trespass-based reasoning is flawed and artificial. The correct analysis should focus exclusively on whether the individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy was violated, per Katz v. United States. While relatively short-term monitoring of a person's movements on public streets is not a search, the use of longer-term GPS monitoring, such as the 28 days of constant surveillance here, impinges on expectations of privacy that society has recognized as reasonable. The majority’s focus on the minor physical trespass of attaching the device disregards the more significant privacy intrusion of long-term electronic monitoring.
Analysis:
This decision revitalized the common-law trespassory theory as a distinct and viable basis for finding a Fourth Amendment search, existing alongside the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' test from Katz. It clarified that Katz supplemented, rather than supplanted, the traditional property-based framework. The concurrences are highly significant, as they reveal that a majority of justices (the four in Alito's concurrence plus Sotomayor) believe that long-term electronic surveillance could violate a reasonable expectation of privacy even without a physical trespass, setting the stage for future legal battles over non-trespassory digital tracking and data collection.
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