DOJ Weighs Supreme Court Challenge in GPS Surveillance Dispute

From The Blog of Legal Times:

Justice Department lawyers continue weighing whether to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to pick up a controversial decision involving law enforcement’s warrantless use of GPS devices to track criminal suspects.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in August vacated the life sentence of a man named Antoine Jones, saying investigators should have obtained a warrant to install a global positioning device on Jones’ vehicle to follow him during a drug trafficking investigation.

The appeals court said the warrantless use of the tracking device, which produced thousands of pages of data and allegedly linked Jones to a drug stash house in Maryland, violated his Fourth Amendment rights. In November, the D.C. Circuit voted 5-4 to refuse to allow the full court to rehear the dispute.