High court orders review of sex offender GPS monitoring

Richard Wolf | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON -- State programs that use GPS systems to monitor sex offenders could eventually be jeopardized based on a preliminary Supreme Court ruling Monday.

The justices gave a North Carolina sex offender another chance to prove in state court that being forced to wear a GPS monitoring bracelet for life could be unconstitutional.

More than 40 states have passed laws in the last decade that call for some type of GPS monitoring of sex offenders, including eight states that monitor them for life. Some states have expanded their programs to include other crimes; California, for instance, monitors gang members along with more than 9,000 sex offenders. At least 13 states monitor domestic abusers.

The court allowed a challenge brought by Torrey Dale Grady, a convicted sex offender from North Carolina, who has two sex crimes on his record – a second-degree offense from 1996, when he was 17, and a 2005 conviction for taking "indecent liberties with a child." He was sentenced to nearly three years for the latter offense.

Grady was ordered by a state Superior Court judge to enter the GPS monitoring program in 2013. It requires him to wear an ankle bracelet around the clock so that all his movements are transmitted to state officials. State officials can enter his home unannounced to maintain the base station.

And because the bracelet must be charged daily, the order "requires him to be plugged into a wall outlet at least once a day for four to six hours at a time," his Supreme Court petition said. The state monitors about 600 other sex offenders.

Grady's challenge contends that the extreme nature of the monitoring constitutes an unconstitutional search under the Fourth Amendment. The high court agreed and sent the case back to the lower court for a full hearing along those lines.

"The state's program is plainly designed to obtain information," the Supreme Court ruled in an unsigned opinion. "And since it does so by physically intruding on a subject's body, it effects a Fourth Amendment search.

"That conclusion, however, does not decide the ultimate question of the program's constitutionality. The Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches.... The North Carolina courts did not examine whether the state's monitoring program is reasonable – when properly viewed as a search – and we will not do so in the first instance."

In its brief, the state attorney general's office contested Grady's facts as outdated and uncorroborated. It said Grady "resorts to hyperbole to characterize the severity and offensiveness of the 'trespass' resulting from the monitoring."

The justices have ruled in the past on such issues as a GPS device surreptitiously attached to a suspect's car and a police search of a cellphone upon arrest. In both cases, the court struck down the searches.

"As GPS surveillance technology advances, the public will continue to demand its use in more – and more intrusive – searches," Grady's petition says. "This court must make certain that such searches comport with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment."