Groups warn Supreme Court of big government intrusion in new case

The American Civil Liberties Union, a Muslim-American group and gun-rights activists are urging the Supreme Court to rule against the government in a case involving law enforcement and privacy rights. The high court will decide whether warrant-less GPS tracking by law enforcement is a violation of Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure.

The U.S. vs. Jones case is scheduled for argument in early November. The ACLU, Council on American-Islamic Relations and Gun Owners of America have all filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Jones in the case, along with other organizations. With an expired warrant that applied only to the District of Columbia, police officers installed a GPS tracker on nightclub owner Antoine Jones’s vehicle when it was parked in a public lot in Maryland. The information they obtained from tracking Jones, whom they suspected of involvement in a cocaine-distribution operation, over the course of a month allowed them to trace Jones’s movements to a house in Maryland. Police reportedly found cocaine, crack and cash inside the residence. Civil liberties advocates argue that the searches were a violation of Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights and that a ruling in favor of the government in this case could result in broad government overreach, threatening other constitutional protections.