Police suspected Antoine Jones of narcotics trafficking and obtained a warrant authorizing installation of a GPS tracking device on his Jeep within 10 days and within the District of Columbia. Officers installed the device on the 11th day while the Jeep was in Maryland, outside the warrant’s geographic scope. They then monitored the vehicle’s movements continuously for 28 days and used the location data to connect Jones to a drug-trafficking conspiracy. Jones was convicted, and he challenged the GPS monitoring as a Fourth Amendment violation.
Does attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle’s movements on public streets constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment?
A Fourth Amendment search occurs when the government physically intrudes on a constitutionally protected area to obtain information. The Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test supplements, but does not replace, the common-law trespassory test.
Yes. The government’s installation of the GPS device on Jones’s vehicle and its use of that device to obtain information was a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Scalia’s majority opinion relied on the Fourth Amendment’s text and common-law trespass principles. A vehicle is an "effect," and the officers physically occupied that effect for the purpose of obtaining information, which is the kind of governmental intrusion the Amendment was designed to regulate. The Court rejected the argument that Katz v. United States displaced this property-based approach, explaining that Katz added to, rather than substituted for, traditional trespass analysis. Because the conduct qualified as a search on trespass grounds, the Court did not decide whether the long-term monitoring alone violated a reasonable expectation of privacy.
No dissent from the judgment. Justice Sotomayor concurred, emphasizing concerns about long-term GPS surveillance and questioning aspects of the third-party doctrine. Justice Alito, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan, concurred in the judgment only, arguing the case should be resolved under Katz because prolonged monitoring of public movements impinges on reasonable expectations of privacy.
Jones revived the property-based/trespass approach to the Fourth Amendment and made clear that physical installation of tracking technology on a person’s property to gather information is a search. The case is significant for modern surveillance law because it limited reliance on purely public-exposure reasoning and set the stage for later digital-privacy decisions, especially Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1 (2013), which also used trespass principles, and Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which addressed extended location tracking under Katz-style privacy analysis.
Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1 (2013) |
Verified |
Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018) |
Abstain |
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