Legal Features
United States v. Jones
Decrying the threat to individual privacy posed by advances in surveillance technology, The Rutherford Institute has filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Jones, a case that will decide the legality of warrantless use of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices by police to track the movements of individuals. At issue in the case is whether police violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures when they charged and convicted Antoine Jones with involvement in a drug conspiracy on the basis of evidence obtained by attaching a GPS device to his automobile that constantly monitored his movements for over a month.
Insisting that individuals have a reasonable expectation that they will not be subject to constant monitoring by the government, and that escalating secretive technological surveillance violates an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, Rutherford Institute attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to uphold the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to suppress the evidence obtained using GPS surveillance.
