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U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS: Lifetime GPS monitoring of sex offender constitutes a Fourth Amendment search; case remanded

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A two-time sex offender ordered to wear a tracking device for the rest of his life will get a chance to pursue his constitutional challenge as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Monday.

In a per curiam decision (PDF), the Supreme Court allowed sex offender Torrey Dale Grady to challenge the tracking device as a violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Grady was ordered to wear the GPS device as a recidivist offender. He had convictions for a second degree sexual offense in 1997 and for taking indecent liberties with a child in 2006, the opinion said.

North Carolina courts had upheld use of the device after Grady served his time, reasoning that the context was civil and the GPS requirement was not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, citing two cases from 2012 and 2013. The first, United States v. Jones, held that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a vehicle constituted a search. The second, Florida v. Jardines, held that police use of a drug-sniffing police dog on a suspect’s front porch was a search.

“In light of these decisions,” the Supreme Court said, “it follows that a state also conducts a search when it attaches a device to a person’s body, without consent, for the purpose of tracking that individual’s movements.”

The conclusion doesn’t necessarily mean Grady will succeed on his Fourth Amendment claim; on remand, he will have to show that the search was unreasonable.

“The reasonableness of a search depends on the totality of the circumstances,” the Supreme Court said, “including the nature and purpose of the search and the extent to which the search intrudes upon reasonable privacy expectations.”

The case is Grady v. North Carolina.