United States v. Antoine Jones

Summary

The Supreme Court held that the Government's installation of a GPS tracking device on Antoine Jones's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements for 28 days, constituted a Fourth Amendment "search," because the Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. The Court reaffirmed that the Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test was added to, not substituted for, the common-law trespassory test, and it declined to reach the Government's alternative argument that the warrantless search was reasonable because officers had probable cause, deeming that argument forfeited because it was not raised below. The judgment of the D.C. Circuit reversing Jones's drug-conspiracy conviction was affirmed. Justice Alito, concurring in the judgment and joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan, would have decided the case solely under Katz based on the duration of the monitoring; Justice Sotomayor, concurring, joined the trespass holding but urged that longer term GPS monitoring invades reasonable expectations of privacy even without a trespass and that the third-party disclosure doctrine may need reconsideration.