Sistema De Posicion Global (Gps)

Criminal defense attorneys, individual rights advocates, judges, and even prosecutors must understand that the government’s use of global positioning system (GPS) surveillance in criminal cases presents potentially complex constitutional issues for the accused, the defense bar, the bench, and society. This article focuses on the recent and divergent federal and state decisions regarding whetherthe government may constitutionally initiate 24-hour surveillance of anyone, anywhere, without judicial guidance, oversight, or scrutiny.
Search. The court has not yet determined whether installation of a GPS device by the government constitutes a search. Court precedent, however, augurs against lower courts finding a “search” when the government monitors vehicles without a warrant via GPS-enableddevices, given the court has determined that attaching a tracking beeper to the inside of a canister for the specific purpose of tracking a vehicle on public roads is not a search.
Toward a “Mosaic Theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy? Justice Louis Brandeis contemplated in his Olmstead dissent that constitutional provisions such as the Fourth Amendment possess the “capacity of adaptation to achanging world.” Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 472 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in on this same issue and scolded his colleagues for their failure to keep pace with innovation and technology.
In People v. Weaver, 909 N.E. 2d 1195 (N.Y. 2009), a New York State Police Department investigator crawled under Weaver’s van, parked on a streetoutside his home, to attach a GPS-enabled device. The device remained attached for 65 days, monitoring and calculating the van’s every movement, location, travel time, and trip length, around-the-clock. Ultimately, the government prosecuted Weaver and another individual; both were charged with two burglaries that occurred in Latham, New York, on Christmas Eve. The trial court denied Weaver’s motion tosuppress the GPS evidence. The jury found Weaver guilty of third-degree burglary and attempted second-degree grand larceny. The state prevailed at the intermediate appellate court level. The New York Court of Appeals deemed GPS satellite surveillance “vastly different” and “exponentially more sophisticated and powerful” than a tracking beeper, and held that it “facilitate[s] a new technologicalperception of the world in which the situation of any object may be followed and exhaustively recorded over, in most cases, a practically unlimited period of time.” Notwithstanding the lesser expectation of privacy one has while in public and in the exterior of one’s vehicle, New York’s high court determined that the defendant had and retained a “residual” privacy expectation in his movements 24hours a day, which included his public movements. This “residual” interest was sufficient “to support his claim of a violation of his constitutional right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.” However, as the Supreme Court (nor any other federal court at the time) had not addressed the matter, the New York Court of Appeals declined to decide the Fourth Amendment question, finding forWeaver that warrantless installation and use of a GPS device to monitor an individual’s whereabouts constitutes an unreasonable illegal search in violation the New York State Constitution. The state court’s analysis has come to be known as the “Mosaic Theory of GPS Surveillance.”
Shortly after Weaver, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit officially split the federal circuitswhen it employed the Mosaic Theory in United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544, 562 (D.C. Cir. 2010), en banc reh’g denied, 625 F.3d 766 (D.C. Cir. 2010), cert. deniedU.S. 131 S. Ct. 671 (2010). There, a joint task force investigated Jones and Maynard, suspecting them of narcotics-related crimes. The government’s investigation included placement of a GPS-enabled surveillance device on Jones’...