In September 2005, FBI agents in conjunction with D.C. Metropolitan police attached a GPS device to respondent Antoine Jones's Jeep Grand Cherokee, which was parked in a public lot in Maryland at the time, to the undercarriage of the vehicle without Jones's knowledge or consent. For the following four weeks, the GPS device calculated every movement and identified every stop Jones made in his vehicle every ten seconds of every day. The government ultimately collected more than 2,000 pages worth of GPS data. Law enforcement agents originally obtained a warrant to install the GPS device, but they failed to comply with the warrant's terms. The warrant was valid for only ten days and authorized the installation of the GPS device within the District of Columbia; the agents installed the device onto Jones's vehicle on the eleventh day while the vehicle was in a public parking lot in Maryland.
Using the device, agents were able to track Jones's Jeep in the vicinity of a suspected stash house in Fort Washington, Md., which confirmed other evidence of Jones driving his Jeep to and from that location. The government ultimately discovered large amounts of narcotics at a suspected stash house in Fort Washington. It concluded that the GPS data showed that Jones had a habit of visiting that address. But the government found no narcotics or drug paraphernalia on Jones, and it had no direct evidence that Jones was responsible for the drugs in Fort Washington. The government contended that Jones was tied to a narcotics conspiracy because of his pattern
of trips to the suspected stash house, his facially innocuous (but allegedly coded) conversations with suspected customers, and the approximately $70,000 that Jones-who was the proprietor of a night club- kept in his car.
A federal grand jury sitting in the District of Columbia charged Jones with conspiring to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine and 50 grams or more of cocaine base and 29 counts of using a communications facility to facilitate a drug-trafficking offense. Before trial, Jones moved to suppress the data obtained from the GPS tracking device. The district court granted the motion in part and denied it in part, explaining that data obtained from the GPS device while the Jeep was on public roads was admissible, but that any data obtained while the Jeep was parked inside the garage adjoining Jones's residence must be suppressed. Therefore only the GPS data related to the Jeep's movements on public roads was introduced at trial. The jury acquitted Jones on a number of the charges and the district court declared a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the conspiracy charge. A grand jury charged respondent in a superseding indictment with a single count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine and 50 grams or more of cocaine base. At the second trial, only the Jeep's public movements from the GPS were introduced at trial and a jury convicted Jones of the conspiracy charge. The district court sentenced Jones to life in prison and ordered Jones to forfeit $1,000,000 in proceeds from drug trafficking.
Jones appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Jones argued that both the installation of the GPS device and the resulting GPS surveillance violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The court of appeals reversed Jones's conviction and concluded that Jones had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the public movements of his vehicle over the course of a month because he had not exposed the totality of those movements to the public. Therefore, the court held that the government's use of a GPS device to monitor those movements and therefore constituted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
The D.C. Circuit denied the government's petition for rehearing en banc. On June 27, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The case is U.S. v. Jones, No. 10-1259. To read the decision of the lower court, click here.
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