United States v. Jones

On Tuesday, the Court heard oral arguments in United States v. Jones.

 In 2004, The FBI began an investigation into allegations of cocaine trafficking by Jones, the owner of a nightclub in the District. During the course of that investigation, the FBI obtained a warrant to place a GPS tracking device on a Jeep owned by Jones and his wife and used by him.

The warrant authorized the agents to attach the GPS within ten days and only in the District of Columbia. They attached it eleven days later while the car was in Maryland. The warrant allowed the FBI to track him for 90 days. But, they only used the device for roughly four weeks.

The GPS was used to track Jones’s movements to and from a suspected stash house. When the FBI executed a search warrant on the location they found nearly 100 kilograms of cocaine along with about 850 thousand dollars.

The FBI found no drugs or paraphernalia on Jones when he was arrested, although they found approximately70 thousand dollars in his car. The government’s main evidence at trial consisted of this money, a series of allegedly coded conversations between Jones and others, and the pattern of Jones’s behavior around the stash house.

At trial, the District Judge permitted use of the GPS information, with the exception of signals that emanated from the car while it was in Jones’s home. The trial judge relied on the Court’s decisions in United States v. Knotts and United States v. Karo, in which the Court permitted use of a beeper to track a car on public roads but not to track material taken into a private home, respectively.

In both cases, the police were actively engaged in following the suspects while the beeper was tracking them and in both cases the tracking was during the course of a single trip, albeit a prolonged one in the case of Karo.

On appeal, the D.C. Circuit reversed the trial court. It distinguished Knotts from a case of prolonged monitoring over the course of several weeks. It noted that the Court in Knotts specifically reserved ruling on so called “dragnet” surveillance, involving the monitoring of many people over a prolonged period.

The circuit court then determined that, although a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on a single trip, a person does have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of his or her movements over the course of several weeks.  The court stated that, first, the totality of a persons movements is not actually revealed to the public because “the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil[,]” second, “the whole reveals more – sometimes a great deal more – than does the sum of its parts.”

“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups – and not just one such fact about a person but all such facts.”

Dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc, judge Sentelle argued that “[t]here is no material difference between tracking the movements of the Knotts defendant with a beeper and tracking the Jones appellant with a GPS. The panel opinion distinguished Knotts – I think unconvincingly – not on the basis of what the police did … but that the volume of information obtained is greater in the present case than in Knotts.”

Judge Kavanaugh wrote separately in dissent, arguing that, although the GPS tracking is not a search under Knotts, the warrantless installation of the device may have been a Fourth Amendment violation.

In its brief, the government’s arguement mirrors judge Sentelle’s arguments about the applicability of Knotts. It also argues that any concerns the Court may have about Orwellian, “dragnet” surveillance of the general public should not form the basis for its decision in this case. It also argues that attaching the device was not a search of a seizure.

Respondent Jones argues that the tracking of Jones’s movements was a search and a seizure regardless of the amount of time it was placed because of the unique technological efficacy of GPS devices compared to beepers. Respondent also argues that the installation and tracking of Jones was a search and a seizure because it meaningfully interfered with his right to exclude others from his property.