scholarly journals Fourth Amendment Constraints on the Technological Monitoring of Convicted Sex Offenders

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben A. McJunkin ◽  
J.J. Prescott
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Sex Offender ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Monitoring Program ◽  
Monitoring Device ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Gps Devices ◽  
Monitoring Technologies

More than forty U.S. states currently track at least some of their convicted sex offenders using GPS devices. Many offenders will be monitored for life. The burdens and expense of living indefinitely under constant technological monitoring have been well documented, but most commentators have assumed that these burdens were of no constitutional moment because states have characterized such surveillance as “civil” in character—and courts have seemed to agree. In 2015, however, the Supreme Court decided in Grady v. North Carolina that attaching a GPS monitoring device to a person was a Fourth Amendment search, notwithstanding the ostensibly civil character of the surveillance. Grady left open the question whether the search—and the state’s technological monitoring program more generally—was constitutionally reasonable. This Essay considers the doctrine and theory of Fourth Amendment reasonableness as it applies to both current and envisioned sex offender monitoring technologies to evaluate whether the Fourth Amendment may serve as an effective check on post-release monitoring regimes.

Dangerous Warrants

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nirej Sekhon
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Police Discretion ◽  
Accurate Identification ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Municipal Court

The Supreme Court has cast judicial warrants as the Fourth Amendment gold standard for regulating police discretion. It has embraced a "warrant preference" on the premise that requiring police to obtain advance judicial approval for searches and seizures encourages accurate identification of evidence and suspects while minimizing interference with constitutional rights. The Court and commentators have overlooked the fact that most outstanding warrants do none of these things. Most outstanding warrants are what this article terms "non-compliance warrants": summarily issued arrest warrants for failures to comply with a court or police order. State and local courts are profligate in issuing such warrants for minor offenses. For example, the Department of Justice found that the municipal court in Ferguson, Missouri issued one warrant for every two of its residents. When issued as wantonly as this, warrants are dangerous because they generate police discretion rather than restrain it. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has, most recently in Utah v. Strieff, treated non-compliance warrants as if no different from the traditional warrants that gave rise to the Fourth Amendment warrant preference. This article argues that non-compliance warrants pose unique dangers, constitutional and otherwise. Non-compliance warrants create powerful incentives for the police to conduct unconstitutional stops, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods. Their enforcement also generates race and class feedback loops. Outstanding warrants beget arrests and arrests beget more warrants. Over time, this dynamic amplifies race and class disparities in criminal justice. The article concludes by prescribing a Fourth Amendment remedy to deter unconstitutional warrant checks. More importantly, the article identifies steps state and local courts might take to stem the continued proliferation of non-compliance warrants.

The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Badger
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
The South ◽  
The Supreme Court

On Monday, March 12, Georgia's senior senator, Walter George, rose in the Senate to read a manifesto blasting the Supreme Court. The Manifesto condemned the “unwarranted decision” of the Court in Brown as a “clear abuse of judicial power” in which the Court “with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.” The signers pledged themselves “to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” It was signed by nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators, by every member of the congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, by all but one of the representatives from Florida, all but one from Tennessee, all but three from North Carolina, and half of the Texas delegation.

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