The latest is on requiring the lifetime use of GPS monitoring bracelets for convicted sex offenders, and based on a recent preliminary ruling from the court, the practice could be endangered. Last month, justices gave a North Carolina sex offender another chance to prove that lifelong monitoring by GPS violates his constitutional rights.
More than most felons, sex offenders bear long-term monitoring, so the inclination to do so is understandable. But it is also important to ensure that the ever-more intrusive applications of technology do not violate the rights set out in the Constitution and its amendments.
In fact, the unrestrained use of GPS technology has already run afoul of the high court, which ruled that police violated the rights of a suspect by surreptitiously attaching a GPS device to his car. In another case involving technology, the justices invalidated a warrantless search of the contents of a suspect’s cellphone.
Two important forces are at work here. One is that police need appropriate access to all the technology they can get in fulfilling their crucial role in the communities they serve. It’s beyond doubt that lawbreakers will use whatever technology they can and it would be wrong to automatically leave police technologically unarmed.
Yet it is also important not to allow technology to run roughshod over the expectations of privacy that the Constitution affords Americans. In their zeal – either to do their jobs or simply to test the limits – police are putting technology to work in ways that the court has found to be unconstitutional, and those rulings have been spot on. What is more, in both the GPS tracking and cellphone cases, police could have cured their problem simply by obtaining a warrant.
The matter of tracking sex offenders is more complicated. A warrant won’t cover the issues that arise from a government requirement for permanent tracking, after a defendant serves whatever sentence a court imposes. There is a legitimate question about whether its requirements violate Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure and perhaps the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment.
It’s not just sex offenders, either. Some states also track gang members and domestic abusers. All of these offenders merit attention and any is likely to fall back into criminal behavior.
If permanent monitoring of these felons, enabled by modern technology, does not violate their constitutional right, it is certainly a close call. The Supreme Court has already signaled that through its action in the North Carolina case. There will be more such cases as modern technology tests the limits of the law.
©2015 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
