The last few weeks you couldn’t randomly toss a homing device in the air without it latching onto a story about the use of GPS tracking in the law enforcement arena. Okay, you could have, but none of those other stories ever seemed to go anywhere.
Back on August 28th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the DEA was justified in attaching a GPS to the vehicle of one Juan Pineda-Moreno; Whether or not Pineda-Morena was involved with the maintenance of a large-scale marijuana operation, Constitutional rights buffs and George Orwell enthusiasts alike have been having a debate-filled field day on the legality of the warrant-less tracking practices of law enforcement .
The main point of contention is that the use of such a tracking device on an unproven hunch, without the express consent provided by a warrant, violates the terms of “illegal search and seizure”– a key component of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This hot button topic reared it’s argumentative head again today, as the Virginia Court of Appeals made a similar ruling, upholding the decision that convicted Sex Offender David L. Foltz did not have his rights violated when the Fairfax Police outfitted his vehicle with a GPS device.
Authorities zeroed in on Foltz after a rash of 11 sexual assaults occurred in Eastern Fairfax in 2008. The defendant had previously been convicted of rape, having spent 17 years behind bars. Police used the prior conviction as justification for tracing his vehicle. By doing so they were able place him at the scene of a previous incident. Thanks to their GPS deployment, Foltz was caught in the act of assaulting a woman.
While the positive yield of nabbing criminals in the act will no doubt provide a valid argument for the use of global positioning systems as a preventative measure to criminal offenses, the bottom line is that even those who have previously committed crimes are subject to the same protections under the constitution as those who have not. The placing of a GPS device on the basis of suspicion is akin to a breach of property and privacy. If officers believe they have probable cause to breach property, then they also have sufficient reason to seek a warrant and take that extra legal step.
Unfortunately, the luxury of taking the extra legal step is not always there. When time is of the essence in law enforcement, and matters of public safety clash with procedure, officers must err on the side of public safety.
While we find it hard to argue with the idea of “better safe than sorry,” the crux of the issue is that once a legal precedent is set on the use of tracking devices without a warrant, then the majority of us are vulnerable to such an invasion of privacy –whether or not we’ve done anything to infer probable cause. After all, if a mere blip on our record can be leveraged as such, then we all our going to have to do our best to stay squeaky clean.
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