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Ever since I was a boy reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I have been hooked on crime mysteries. Ah, the ratiocinations of C. Auguste Dupin.
But, here’s a problem in modern US crime.
In 2005, the FBI, along with the police force of the District of Columbia, focused their gaze on one, Antoine, Jones. Mr. Jones was a local nightclub owner who lived south of the D.C. area. In his photo, this African American man looks to be about 35 years of age, with finely cropped hair and a bisected planar mustache. In a lineup, I would mistake him for Paul Pierce of the Celtics.
It seems that Mr. Jones’s nightclub needed a little financial shot in the arm, so to speak, so proprietor Jones started a lucrative narcotics business on the side. The feds get onto this and set up the ol’ sting operation.
Like something out of Hollywood, they sneak up to Jones’s little Jeep Grand Cherokee and attach a GPS Tracker to it. I can imagine it was one of those magnetic ones. Maybe they hid in the sewer and slid open a manhole cover while he was stopped at a traffic light. We need something that looks good on film. I can see their heads bobbing out of the manhole, their arms reaching up to magnetically attach the GPS tracker, their quick leap back down into the sewer goo to avoid a semi tractor trailer decapitating and smashing their heads. Surely, they did something clandestinely clever like that. The masterminds of surveillance then sit back and collect data while Mr. Jones is none the wiser. The time bomb of fate is ticking. Tick, … tick, … tick.
The case builds to a climax. They are ready to spring the trap. The feds surround his little bungalow in Ft. Washington, MD, pound down the doors and find the mother load – 220 pounds of cocaine and a million dollars in cash.
But, that was in 2005.
Here we are, seven years later, and Mr. Jones has been on the appeals trail. He made it to the Supreme Court with his defense and last month got a ruling.
The FBI prosecutor argued that putting a tracking device on a car was “too trivial a violation of property rights to matter and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.” Whoa. Can you believe that? That was the best defense they could come up with?
It seems that while the feds had a warrant for the cell phone, they did not get legal permission to attach the GPS tracker. (They obviously felt they did not need one. The guy on sewer duty was probably out of work.)
The Supreme Court ruled that the government violated Mr. Jones’s Fourth Amendment’s protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle. The court split over the specificities of the violation.
Does that mean he gets his cocaine and million dollars of drug money back?
Not to compete with the ratiocinations of C. Auguste Dupin, but that decision opens a whole new can of worms – will this affect the police routinely looking at the tolltag entrances and exists, for example? At one time, they tried stand-off Infrared detectors to look at heat in a house and detect the marijuana growers. What other high tech surveillance do you think might be in jeopardy of needing a warrant? Thoughts?