When a nightclub owner was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly participating in a drug trafficking operation, he immediately filed an appeal, claiming that the investigators' use of a GPS device to track him had constituted an unreasonable search and seizure. This week, in a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed.

The suspect was initially arrested after police officers had tracked him with a GPS device for four weeks, during which time they were allegedly able to tie him to a house that had been used to hold money and drugs. After he was convicted, the man filed an appeal, claiming that the GPS search had violated his constitutional protection against unreasonable searches. An appeals court agreed, and reversed his conviction and sentence. The case eventually made its way up to the Supreme Court, where the justices handed down a surprising ruling.

The seven justices of the Supreme Court found that the police use of the GPS device had, in fact, violated the suspect's constitutional rights. The judges ruled that police and government agencies must first get a judge to sign off on a search warrant before installing GPS devices on suspects' vehicles and using those devices to track the suspect's movements.

Although this ruling may not significantly affect the day-to-day operations of police investigations, it is promising that the high court is setting this precedent. In doing so, they are indicating that they will not be uniformly tolerant of the use of technology in police investigations if it would serve to violate suspects' individual rights.

Source: Post-Dispatch, "Warrant needed for GPS tracking, high court says," Jan. 23, 2012