USA v. JONES

• Citation: 625 F.3d 766
• Decision Date: 19 November 2010
• Docket Number: 08-3030.,No. 08-3034,08-3034
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee v. Antoine JONES, Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (District of Columbia)

625 F.3d 766

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee

v.Antoine JONES, Appellant.

Nos. 08-3034, 08-3030.

United States Court of Appeals,District of Columbia Circuit.

Nov. 19, 2010.

OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE

Roy W. McLeese, III, Esquire, Assistant U.S. Attorney, John Vincent Geise, Rachel Carlson Lieber, Assistant U.S. Attorney, U.S. Attorney's Office, Washington, DC, for Appellee.

Stephen C. Leckar, Shainis & Peltzman Chartered, Washington, DC, for Appellant.

Daniel I. Prywes, Bryan Cave LLP, Arthur Barry Spitzer, American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area, David Lane Sobel Law Office Of David L. Sobel Washington, DC, Amicus Curiae for Appellants.

BEFORE: SENTELLE, Chief Judge, and GINSBURG, HENDERSON, ROGERS, TATEL, GARLAND, BROWN, GRIFFITH, and KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judges.

ORDER

Appellee's petition for rehearing en banc in No. 08-3034, and the response thereto were circulated to the full court, and a vote was requested. Thereafter, a majority of the judges eligible to participate did not vote in favor of the petition. Upon consideration of the foregoing, it is

ORDERED that the petition be denied.

* Chief Judge Sentelle and Circuit Judges Brown and Kavanaugh would grant the petition for rehearing en banc.

* A statement by Circuit Judges Ginsburg, Tatel, and Griffith concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc is attached.

* A statement by Chief Judge Sentelle, joined by Circuit Judges Henderson, Brown, and Kavanaugh dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc is attached.

* A statement by Circuit Judge Kavanaugh dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc is attached.

GINSBURG, TATEL and GRIFFITH, Circuit Judges, concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc:

In response to the Government's petition, we underline two matters. First, because the Government did not argue the points, the court did not decide whether, absent a warrant, either reasonable suspicion or probable cause would have been sufficient to render the use of the GPS lawful; to the extent the Government invoked the automobile exception to the warrant requirement, as we pointed out, that exception applies only when “a car is readily mobile and probable cause exists to believe it contains contraband,” neither of which elements the Government satisfied. 615 F.3d 544, 567 (quoting Pennsylvania v. Labron, 518 U.S. 938, 940, 116 S.Ct. 2485, 135 L.Ed.2d 1031 (1996)). Second, the Government's petition complains that the court's opinion “implicitly calls into question common and important practices such as sustained visual surveillance and photographic surveillance of public places,” Pet. at 2, but that is not correct. The court explicitly noted: “This case does not require us to, and therefore we do not, decide whether a hypothetical instance of prolonged visual surveillance would be a search subject to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment.” 615 F.3d at 566.

SENTELLE, Chief Judge, joined by HENDERSON, BROWN, and KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judges, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

The panel opinion in this case held that the government's warrantless use of a global positioning system (“GPS”) device to track the public movements of appellant Antoine Jones's vehicle for approximately four weeks was an unreasonable search in violation of Jones's Fourth Amendment rights. In my view, this question should be reviewed by the court en banc because the panel's decision is inconsistent not only with every other federal circuit which has considered the case, but more importantly, with controlling Supreme Court precedent set forth in United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 103 S.Ct. 1081, 75 L.Ed.2d 55 (1983).

In Knotts, the Supreme Court reviewed a case in which law enforcement officers had placed a radio transmitter (“beeper”) inside a chloroform container which was in turn placed inside a motor vehicle. Through the use of the electronic signals from the beeper, the police tracked the chloroform container from one automobile to another across the length of an interstate journey from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Shell Lake, Wisconsin. The information obtained from the electronic monitoring was augmented by intermittent physical surveillance and by monitoring from a helicopter. In upholding the constitutionality of the surveillance by electronic monitoring, the Supreme Court reviewed the establishment of the privacy interest as the principal right protected by the Fourth Amendment's guarantee. To briefly summarize the Court's jurisprudence from Knotts and its predecessors: if there is no invasion of a reasonable expectation of privacy, there is no violation of the Fourth Amendment protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S. Const. Amendment IV.

Applying that jurisprudence to the electronically enhanced surveillance in Knotts, the Court declared that “[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.” 460 U.S. at 281, 103 S.Ct. 1081. The Court went on to note that “[w]hen [the suspect] traveled over the public streets, he voluntarily conveyed to anyone who wanted to look the fact that he was traveling over particular roads in a particular direction, the fact of whatever stops he made, and the fact of his final destination when he exited from public roads onto private property.” Id. at 281-82, 103 S.Ct. 1081. The Court further reasoned that since visual surveillance from public places along the route or adjacent to the destination would have revealed all of the same information to the police, “[t]he fact that the officers ... relied not only on visual surveillance, but also on the use of the beeper to signal the presence of [the suspect's] automobile to the police receiver, does not alter the situation.” Id. at 282, 103 S.Ct. 1081. Central to the Knotts Court's reasoning, and, I think, controlling in this case is the observation that “[n]othing in the Fourth Amendment prohibited the police from augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed upon them at birth with such enhancement as science and technology afforded them in this case.” Id.

Everything the Supreme Court stated in Knotts is equally applicable to the facts of the present controversy. There is no material difference between tracking the movements of the Knotts defendant with a beeper and tracking the Jones appellant with a GPS. The panel opinion distinguishes Knotts-I think unconvincingly-not on the basis that what the police did in that case is any different than this, but that the volume of information obtained is greater in the present case than in Knotts. The panel asserts that “the totality of Jones's movements over the course of a month ... was not exposed to the public.” The panel reasoned that “first, unlike one's movements during a single journey, the whole of one's movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all these movements is effectively nil.” 615 F.3d at 558. I suggest that this assertion in no way demonstrates that Jones's movements were not exposed to the public. The fact that no particular individual sees them all does not make the movements any less public. Nor is it evident at what point the likelihood of a successful continued surveillance becomes so slight that the panel would deem the otherwise public exposure of driving on a public thoroughfare to become private. As the Knotts Court recalled, it is well established that “[w]hat a person knowingly exposes to the public ... is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.” Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). In applying that principle in Knotts, the Supreme Court declared that “a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.” 460 U.S. at 281, 103 S.Ct. 1081.

The panel opinion seems to recognize that Jones had no reasonable expectation of privacy in any particular datum revealed by the GPS-augmented surveillance, but somehow acquired one through “the totality of Jones's movements over the course of a month.” 615 F.3d at 558. In the view of the panel, this is true “because that whole reveals more ... than does the sum of its parts.” While this may be true, it is not evident how it affects the reasonable expectation of privacy by Jones. The reasonable expectation of privacy as to a person's movements on the highway is, as concluded in Knotts, zero. The sum of an infinite number of zero-value parts is also zero. Nowhere in Knotts or any other Supreme Court Fourth Amendment decision since the adoption of the expectation of privacy rationale in Katz has the Court ever suggested that the test of the reasonable expectation is in any way related to the intent of the user of the data obtained by the surveillance or other alleged search. The words “reasonable expectation of privacy” themselves suggest no such element. The expectation of privacy is on the part of the observed, not the observer. Granted, the degree of invasion of that expectation may be measured by the invader's intent, but an invasion does not occur unless there is such a reasonable expectation.

Lest the importance of this opinion be underestimated, I would note that the invasion the panel found was not in the use of the GPS device, but in the aggregation of the information obtained. Presumably, had the GPS device been used for an hour or perhaps a day, or whatever period the panel believed was consistent with a normal surveillance, the evidence obtained could have been admitted without Fourth Amendment problem. Therefore, it would appear, as appellee argues, that this novel aggregation approach to the reasonable expectation of privacy would prohibit not only GPS-augmented surveillance, but any other police surveillance of sufficient length to support consolidation of data into the sort of pattern or mosaic...