NY Court Says Police Can't Track Suspect With GPS

SoundGuyNoise sends in a story that brings into relief just how unsettled is the question of whether police can use GPS to track suspects without a warrant. Just a couple of days ago a Wisconsin appeals court ruled that such tracking is OK; and today an appeals court in New York reached the opposite conclusion. "It was wrong for a police investigator to slap a GPS tracking device under a defendant's van to track his movements, the state's top court ruled today. A sharply divided NY Court of Appeals, in a 4-3 decision, reversed the burglary conviction of defendant Scott Weaver, 41, of Watervliet. Four years ago, State Police tracked Weaver over 65 days in connection with the burglary investigation."

Comments

Headline is inaccurate

[ergo98]

The judgment was that they couldn't track a person without a warrant. I presume that if they had convinced a judge of probable cause before they lojacked the suspect, they would have been in the clear.

Re:Headline is inaccurate

[maxume]

It isn't that strange, state laws are anything but uniform.

Re:Headline is inaccurate

[Azghoul]

Which is strange to me: They tracked one guy for 65 days but didn't think they had probable cause enough to get a warrant to do so?

Re:Headline is inaccurate

[cayenne8]

"It isn't that strange, state laws are anything but uniform."

Nothing strange about it at all!! That's the way things are (supposed) to be set up. Rather than an all knowing all powerful federal govt. telling you what to do...the most power to make laws should be at the state and then local level. This is done in that state and local are more apt to serve their populations needs and wishes better. People living in NYC, and Tucson, AZ have vastly different needs and wishes due to climate, land mass, and culture of the people. You are a citizen of your state first, and then a citizen of the United States...

It is great that way, in that if you don't like the laws and regulations where you live, you are free to move to a state that is more in line with your way of thinking. Wanna have medicinal pot easily? Move to CA. Things like that.

Hehehe...if you think these laws are wide in variance....just look at liquor laws not only from state to state, but, from county to county (or parish to parish in LA)....those are the most fscked up things I've ever seen when traveling.

But, what you observed isn't a bad thing or strange thing. The US was set up that way!!!

Re:Headline is inaccurate

[Ungrounded Lightning]

HA! Good luck getting the Supreme Court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn(1942)

Overturning Wickard v. Filburn is a major piece of what this new constitutionalist movement is about.

That decision (on a Great Depression era central-economic-planning law, during the runup to WW II) is what turned the commerce clause into a blank check for the Fed to regulate anything they damned well pleased - and has since been used for such things as justifying federal regulation of marijuana growing for personal consumption (because it would affect the traffic in out-of-state marijuana supplies!).

Do any of you really think that the people who wrote the Constitution would have considered banning growing of wheat to feed your own pigs to be a proper federal "regulation of interstate commerce in wheat"?

What's the matter with these cops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't they just ask for a warrant, and not have to worry whether the case is going to be thrown out?

If it's worth the trouble to track the guy for 65 days, surely it's worth the trouble to get a warrant.

Re:What's the matter with these cops?

[dontmakemethink]

Exactly. It surely crossed their minds, but asking for a warrant made it possible for a judge to prevent them from tracking the suspect. By not doing so the police are in effect admitting it was not a legal procedure.

Fourth Amendment

[DarrenBaker]

My understanding here is that monitoring without a warrant would constitute (no pun intended) a breach of the 'unreasonable search and seizure' part of the US constitution. If a cop can't investigate someone on the sole basis of profiling (racial or otherwise), then he shouldn't be allowed to GPS tag them without a warrant either. Seems simple to me... No?

Re:Did he still steal stuff?

[WCMI92]

From the skimming I did of the summary it looks like the sentence was over turned because they didn't get a warrant for using GPS to track the guy. Should someone who committed a crime be let go because some did not follow procedures NO, should there be discipline for not using proper procedures absolutely. Improper procedures should not cause a case to be overturned unless of course it could be shown that the person was guilty only because of the improper procedures.

Wrong. The ONLY punishment appropriate when government violates the rights of the accused in the course of collecting evidence is to deprive them of the use of that evidence.

If that means guilty people getting off, so be it, in the end, denying government actors the use of illegally obtained evidence in the end is the ONLY way we have giving them a disincentive to conduct illegal searches and seizures.

The Constitution is not a technicality.
 

That is the very foundation of our legal system

[Rix]

That it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to convict a single innocent man.

Throwing the case out is the discipline used when the police or prosecution step out of line.

Re:Did he still steal stuff?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Yes.

Beyond the constitutional arguments, The exclusionary rule is, arguably, one of the few effective measures for keeping police from disregarding due process and abusing their power. Otherwise, it is oh-so-very-very-tempting to just bend the rules a little to get the guy you "know" is the right one. If doing the wrong thing is a good way of getting your case thrown out, you'll be a lot less likely to do the wrong thing.

There is empirical evidence, as well, for this position. This is an op-ed from a legal academic who has studied the matter.

"Getting tough on crime" at the expense of method is initially attractive; but it is extraordinarily corrosive to our rights and liberties in the medium and long terms. The ethical flexibility that allows the cops to create a fictional confidential informant to seize otherwise unavailable evidence today, will be the same flexibility that allows the cops to create fictional evidence tomorrow.

Re:That is a 1960's liberal mistake.

[Crazy Man on Fire]

The way to deal with police mistakes is with sanctions and fines.

So, the police get a slap on the wrist and an innocent person goes to the electric chair? No. Absolutely no. We have to err on the side of caution and give the accused the benefit of the doubt. Innocent until proven guilty, and you can't be proven guilty with illegally obtained evidence.

This is the way it was before the 1960s.

I'd like to see a citation for this. Even if it is true, so what? Who cares what it was like before the 1960s. We didn't have high speed internet before the 1960s either. Should we also go back to computers that take up a whole room and aren't connected to one another?

Re:Personally, I would have ruled for the state

[tilandal]

If having a plant listen to a phone conversation is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why doing the same thing through a switch-box would not be.

Re:That is a 1960's liberal mistake.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free.

Tell you what. I'll live with the criminals, and you live in the next town over where the cops can do whatever the hell they want. I guarantee you I'll have a longer, safer life than you will. What people like you never seem to understand is that when cops don't follow the law, they're no longer serving and protecting -- they're just the biggest, toughest, meanest gang on the street.

Re:Did he still steal stuff?

[BaronHethorSamedi]

Wrong. The ONLY punishment appropriate when government violates the rights of the accused in the course of collecting evidence is to deprive them of the use of that evidence.

It might be worth pointing out that this is only true in the United States. No other country (including those with search and seizure protections enshrined in their respective constitutions) adheres to an exclusionary rule as a matter of constitutional principle.

Even in the U.S., the exclusionary rule took a while to evolve. Even after it was crafted as a federal standard, the states took a while to fall in line. There are ways of deterring bad official conduct that don't involve excluding relevant evidence of a criminal offense. (Civil suit against the police, independent disciplinary bodies, etc.) Other countries manage just fine.

Re:Close, but no cigar

[dontmakemethink]

This is very much about big brother watching you. The police work wasn't sloppy, they surely knew they dd not have sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant, so they pretended to assume it wasn't necessary.

They could have, and should have, put a tail on him the old fashioned way. That way someone can actually account for the suspect's whereabouts and conduct. A GPS tracker indicates a lot more than just a suspect's car's position, and goes where conventional surveillance cannot. If a form of tracking is allowed, then the information gathered by it is admissible in court.

That means if a murder suspect parks in front of a gun shop, the jury gets to hear about it, even if the suspect gets a slice of pizza next door. With nobody there to bear witness, the information gathered cannot be interpreted accurately and only serves to prejudice the suspect and/or waste the court's time deciding what to make of it.