The Supreme Court ordered North Carolina's legal system to re-examine whether it is constitutional to require a convicted sex offender to wear an electronic GPS anklet for the rest of his life. For the moment, Monday's ruling renders uncertain the legal justification for North Carolina's electronic monitoring program—which has more than 600 offenders wearing ankle bracelets—and the future of some 40 other states that also require GPS surveillance on tens of thousands of others.

The justices ordered North Carolina to apply reasoning from a 2012 decision when the high court ruled that affixing GPS devices to vehicles to track their every move without a court warrant was an unconstitutional trespass or search. In doing so, the justices sided with sex offender Torrey Grady, 36, who demanded that the 2012 precedent should apply when the GPS device is hooked to a human.

In an unsigned opinion, the court ordered the North Carolina court system to sufficiently justify the GPS anklet in light of the court's 2012 decision. The decision was arguably one of the biggest high court privacy rulings for the digital age.

"The State’s program is plainly designed to obtain information. And since it does so by physically intruding on a subject's body, it effects a Fourth Amendment search," the Supreme Court ruled (PDF) Monday in response to Grady's petition.

That conclusion, however, does not decide the ultimate question of the program’s constitutionality. The Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches. The reasonableness of a search depends on the totality of the circumstances, including the nature and purpose of the search and the extent to which the search intrudes upon reasonable privacy expectations.... 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 2012, the Supreme Court essentially said that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle amounted to a search "within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment." Because the FBI did not get a warrant, the conviction and life sentence of an accused drug dealer named Antoine Jones was tossed. Thousands of other GPS devices secretly placed on cars were also disabled.

Grady's attorney, Mark Hayes, said in a recent telephone interview that the surveillance at issue "is even more intrusive because you're talking about literally affixing a device to a person."

North Carolina prosecutors had asked that the court not re-open Grady's challenge to North Carolina's Satellite-Based-Monitoring (SBM) program. Joseph Finarelli, special deputy attorney general, told the justices in a filing (PDF) that Grady's attorneys have resorted "to hyperbole to characterize the severity and offensiveness of the 'trespass' resulting from the monitoring inherent in the SBM program."

That said, Grady has some tough legal terrain ahead of him, despite the Supreme Court's decision Monday. That's because in 1997, the justices ruled that sexual predators could be confined against their will to a rehabilitation setting after their criminal prison terms expire.

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