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In a per curiam opinion this week, Grady v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced recent 4th Amendment decisions in holding that when the government physically occupies private property for the purpose of obtaining information, it engages in a search under the 4th Amendment.

The State of North Carolina subjects certain repeat offenders to a lifetime of satellite-based monitoring (SBM) after they complete their sentences. The plaintiff, Torrey Dale Grady, argued that such a program represents a violation of his 4th Amendment rights under recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions, including a 2012 case called United States v. Jones (installing a GPS tracker on a suspects car represents a search) and a 2013 case called Florida v. Jardines (using a drug-sniffing dog on a suspects porch represents a search).

The Supreme Court agreed with Grady that such monitoring constitutes a search. In light of these decisions, it follows that a state also conducts a search when it attaches a device to a persons body, without consent, for the purpose of tracking that individuals movements.

In concluding otherwise, the North Carolina Court of Appeals apparently placed decisive weight on the fact that the States monitoring program is civil in nature. See Jones, ___ N. C. App., at ___, 750 S. E. 2d, at 886 (the instant case involves a civil SBM proceeding). It is well settled, however, that the Fourth Amendments protection extends beyond the sphere of criminal investigations, Ontario v. Quon, 560 U. S. 746, 755 (2010), and the governments purpose in collecting information does not control whether the method of collection constitutes a search. A building inspector who enters a home simply to ensure compliance with civil safety regulations has undoubtedly conducted a search under the Fourth Amendment.

The court also rejected North Carolinas somewhat strange argument that its monitoring program is not meant to collect information:

The satellite-based monitoring program shall use a system that provides all of the following: (1) Time-correlated and continuous tracking of the geographic location of the subject . (2) Reporting of subjects violations of prescriptive and proscriptive schedule or location requirements. N. C. Gen. Stat. Ann. 14208.40(c).

The States program is plainly designed to obtain information. And since it does so by physically intruding on a subjects body, it effects a Fourth Amendment search.

The Court did not, however, examine whether the program constitutes an unreasonable, and therefore unconstitutional, search. The case was remanded to a lower court to sort through that issue.

Notwithstanding the reasonability issue, this ruling reinforces a heartening trend in 4th Amendment jurisprudence away from the nebulous reasonable expectation of privacy standard and toward a more concrete common-law trespass standard, at least insofar as searches of private property are concerned.

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Supreme Court Reinforces Jones Conception of 4th Amendment