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Us Vs Jones Case Study

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United States v. Jones United States v. Jones is one of many cases that the Supreme Court has ruled on. The case was one of the few cases that has a unanimous ruling. Evening though there was a unanimous rule there was still a debate on reasoning behind the ruling. The debate is between privacy given to a person’s property and a person’s expectation of privacy. United States v. Jones deals with a global positioning device attached to Jones’ car by officers without a warrant. The Supreme Court ruled that the attachment of the global positioning device was a violation of the fourth amendment. Justice Scalia gave the plurality opinion and their reasoning was that the intrusion on the car made it a violation of the fourth amendment. …show more content…

During the twenty-eight days, they replaced the battery while the car was parked in a different parking lot in Maryland (United States v. Jones, 2012). The lower courts ruled that only the data gained while the vehicle was parked in the garage adjoining to his home would be inadmissible, but all other information would be admissible. They ruled this way because people traveling on public roads have no reasonable expectation of privacy of his movements (United States v. Jones, 2012). The D.C. Circuit court reversed the conviction and ruled that a warrantless use of a GPS device to track his movements while on public streets a violation of the fourth amendment. The reasoning behind their ruling was the information was exposed that would not have been if they did not have every movement he had made over the course of four weeks and this information was not accessible by the general public just by him driving on public streets (Anthony s. Barkow, 2011). Justice Scalia with three other justices argued that the intrusion on the vehicle without a warrant is what made the tracking of the vehicle movements a violation of the fourth amendment. Plurality opinion used the property theory of privacy from the eighteenth century. The property theory of privacy is that one has privacy in things that they own. Using this theory, Justice Scalia came to the ruling that Jones’ fourth amendment right was violated when the agents applied the GPS to Jones’

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