Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2012

United States v. Jones

181 L. Ed. 2d 911 | 2012 U.S. LEXIS 1063 | 132 S. Ct. 945 | 565 U.S. 400 | 80 U.S.L.W. 4125 | 23 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 102

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, this case restored a property-based Fourth Amendment rule: when the Government physically intrudes on a person’s protected property to obtain information, it conducts a search, even if the information concerns movements visible on public roads.

Background

Federal agents suspected Antoine Jones of leading a large cocaine-distribution conspiracy. They obtained a warrant authorizing installation of a GPS tracker on the Jeep Grand Cherokee Jones exclusively drove, but they installed it on the eleventh day rather than within the warrant’s ten-day limit and installed it in Maryland rather than the District of Columbia. For 28 days, agents used the device to record the Jeep’s movements, producing more than 2,000 pages of location data.

Jones moved to suppress the GPS evidence. The District Court suppressed data gathered while the Jeep was in the garage adjoining his home but admitted the remaining data, reasoning that a motorist has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements on public roads. After an initial mistrial, the Government used the GPS data at a second trial to link Jones to a stash house, and the jury convicted him of drug conspiracy. The D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that the warrantless GPS monitoring violated the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court affirmed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle’s movements on public streets is a Fourth Amendment search.

Holding

Yes. The Government conducted a search by physically occupying Jones’s vehicle, an “effect,” to obtain information.

Reasoning

The Fourth Amendment protects the people in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” and a vehicle is plainly an effect. By attaching the GPS tracker to the Jeep while Jones possessed and exclusively drove it, agents physically intruded on a constitutionally protected item of personal property for the purpose of gathering information about his movements. That combination of a physical intrusion and information gathering constituted a search.

The Court treated this conclusion as consistent with the original understanding of the Fourth Amendment. At common law, an unauthorized entry onto another’s protected property was a trespass, and the Amendment was centrally concerned with government intrusions on the enumerated protected areas. The Government’s physical occupation of Jones’s Jeep to obtain data therefore fell within the Amendment’s historical core.

Katz v. United States added the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy framework, but it did not eliminate the older property-based protection. Fourth Amendment rights do not rise or fall solely with Katz. A trespassory intrusion on a person, house, paper, or effect for the purpose of obtaining information remains independently sufficient to establish a search.

The Government’s reliance on United States v. Knotts and United States v. Karo was misplaced. In those beeper cases, the tracking device was placed in a container before it came into the defendant’s possession, with the then-owner’s consent. Jones, in contrast, possessed the Jeep when the Government physically attached its device. Likewise, the fact that the Jeep’s locations on public roads were observable did not excuse the physical encroachment used to collect that information.

The Court did not decide whether prolonged GPS monitoring without a physical trespass would violate a reasonable expectation of privacy under Katz. Nor did it decide the duration of electronic tracking that might become constitutionally problematic absent a trespass. Those questions were unnecessary because the physical intrusion on Jones’s vehicle supplied a narrower ground for decision.

Issue #2

Whether the GPS search was nevertheless reasonable because agents had reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe Jones led a drug conspiracy.

Holding

The Court did not consider the argument because the Government forfeited it by failing to raise it below.

Reasoning

The Government argued in the Supreme Court that the search was reasonable because agents had reasonable suspicion and probable cause. But it had not made that argument in the D.C. Circuit, so that court had no occasion to address it. The Supreme Court therefore treated the contention as forfeited and affirmed the judgment without deciding whether probable cause would have made this warrantless search reasonable.

Concurrences

Justice Sotomayor

Reasoning

Justice Sotomayor joined the Court’s property-based holding. She agreed that the Government conducted a search when it physically intruded on Jones’s Jeep to obtain information, and she regarded this rule as an irreducible constitutional minimum protecting the privacy interests embodied in property people possess or control.

She emphasized, however, that the Fourth Amendment also protects privacy without a physical trespass. As surveillance increasingly relies on factory-installed tracking systems, smartphones, and other technologies that can be monitored remotely, the trespass test alone will not resolve many future cases. Those non-trespassory methods remain subject to Katz’s reasonable-expectation-of-privacy analysis.

In her view, long-term GPS tracking can invade reasonable expectations of privacy because it creates a precise and comprehensive record of a person’s movements. Aggregated location data can reveal intimate details of familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual life, while cheap and secret monitoring removes practical constraints that once limited pervasive surveillance. The possibility that police could theoretically obtain similar information through traditional observation does not resolve the privacy question.

Justice Sotomayor also questioned the continuing breadth of the third-party doctrine in the digital age. People routinely disclose extensive information to service providers and online businesses for limited purposes, and she doubted that such limited disclosure should automatically eliminate all Fourth Amendment protection against government access.

Justice Alito

Reasoning

Justice Alito concurred only in the judgment, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. He rejected the majority’s trespass-based rationale as an artificial revival of eighteenth-century tort concepts. In his view, Katz displaced the idea that a technical trespass itself determines whether there has been a search, and attaching a small device that does not interfere with a car’s operation should not be the constitutional focus.

He would instead ask whether the Government violated a reasonable expectation of privacy by conducting long-term GPS monitoring. The critical intrusion was not the physical attachment of the device but the Government’s ability to secretly track and catalogue every movement of Jones’s vehicle for four weeks.

Justice Alito argued that the majority’s approach produces arbitrary results. It would make even very brief tracking constitutionally significant when police physically attach a device, yet might offer no protection if police obtain equivalent long-term tracking information through a manufacturer-installed system or other means without physical contact. It could also make constitutional coverage turn on technical variations in state property law or the timing of vehicle ownership and possession.

Applying Katz, Justice Alito concluded that short-term tracking on public streets generally accords with settled expectations under Knotts, but long-term tracking in investigations of most ordinary offenses does not. Before modern GPS technology, comprehensive surveillance over weeks was so expensive and resource-intensive that people reasonably expected it would not occur routinely. The four weeks of continuous tracking here plainly crossed the line, although he declined to identify the exact point at which monitoring becomes a search.

He added that legislatures may be better equipped than courts to create detailed rules for rapidly changing surveillance technology. Still, until Congress or state legislatures provide comprehensive protections, the Fourth Amendment’s reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test requires treating the prolonged monitoring in this case as a search.