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Criminal Procedure Keyed to Dressler
United States v. Jones
Citation:
565 U.S. 400, 132 S.Ct. 945, 181 L.Ed.2d 911.Facts
The defendant was a night club owner. He came under suspicion of trafficking in narcotics and was made the target of an investigation. Agents installed a GPS tracking device on the undercarriage of the defendant’s Jeep while it was parked in a public parking lot. Over the next 28 days, the Government used the device to track the vehicle’s movements, and once had to replace the device’s battery when the vehicle was parked in a different public lot. By means of signals from multiple satellites, the device established the vehicle’s location within 50 to 100 feet, and communicated that location by cellular phone to a Government computer. It relayed more than 2,000 pages of data over the 4-week period.
The Government ultimately obtained enough evidence and the defendant was convicted. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the conviction because the evidence obtained by warrantless use of the GPS device which, it said, violated the Fourth Amendment.
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