The Tyler Group: Laws need to pick up with technology

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Lawmakers and the courts have got to shift fast to address the civil rights implications of up-and-coming technology in a far more attached age.

A federal appeals court changed as an appeal by the lawyers debated that proof from a GPS device placed on a defendant’s car in Vermont with no search warrant was improperly allowed in a trial.

Rather common sense would have been dictated that law enforcement would require court permission to utilize a device as intrusive as a GPS to track a suspect.

But in 2009, what seems like common sense was not the law back then, after an agent from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration placed a GPS device on then-drug suspect Stephen T. Aguiar’s car.

In 2011, Aguiar was convicted of conspiracy and distributing cocaine in 2008 and 2009. William Murray and Corey Whitcomb, both convicted on lesser charges, evidence from the GPS tracking was also introduced in their trials.

And not until 2012 that it didn’t happen while the Supreme Court ruled that police must acquire a search warrant prior to placing GPS tracking devices on a vehicle.

In their ineffective appeal ahead of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the defence lawyers disputed evidence collected by means of the GPS devices with no a search warrant despoiled Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The appellate court acknowledged in its ruling, “The GPS device was used to track Aguiar’s vehicles on public thoroughfares, with technology undertaking an activity that police officers would have physically performed in the past.”

However the court said the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that planting a GPS device on vehicles to track movements amounts to a search, thus requiring a court-approved search warrant until three years after Vermont incident.

The ruling, in effect, says that in 2009 the law had yet to catch up to the growing use of a technology by law enforcement.

The high court ruling demonstrates how analysis of the law can become accustomed to the spread of new technology; nevertheless the pace needs to rise up.

The stand of innovation these days means that more than a few generations of a technology can come online in three years with new challenges.

Those assigned with saving Americans’ constitutional rights should keep up with the pace of promising technology.