Grady v. North Carolina
The Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina's practice of physically attaching a satellite GPS monitor to a convicted sex offender's body counts as a Fourth Amendment search, even though the state labeled its monitoring program civil rather than criminal.
The Court sent the case back to North Carolina's courts, which had never actually decided whether this kind of lifelong tracking search is reasonable -- the question that determines whether it is ultimately constitutional.
“it follows that a State also conducts a search when it attaches a device to a person’s body, without consent, for the purpose of tracking that individual’s movements.”
The Court's core holding extending Fourth Amendment search doctrine to body-worn tracking devices.
How it got here: North Carolina trial and appellate courts rejected Grady's Fourth Amendment challenge; the state supreme court summarily dismissed his appeal, and he asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review that dismissal.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Torrey Dale Grady was convicted of sex offenses in North Carolina in 1997 and 2006. After finishing his sentence, the state ordered him, as a repeat offender, to wear a satellite tracking device for the rest of his life under its monitoring program for recidivist sex offenders. Grady argued that being forced to wear the device violated his Fourth Amendment rights.
The question before the Court
Does making a convicted sex offender wear a GPS ankle monitor for life count as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, even though the monitoring program is labeled civil rather than criminal?
Why it matters
Sex offenders subject to satellite monitoring programs like North Carolina's can now argue in court that the tracking itself triggers Fourth Amendment scrutiny, forcing states to justify these programs as reasonable rather than assuming labeling them "civil" puts them outside constitutional review entirely.
What changes now
The case returns to the North Carolina courts, which must now decide the question the Supreme Court left open: whether the state's lifelong satellite monitoring of Grady, now properly understood as a Fourth Amendment search, is actually reasonable given its purpose and the extent of the intrusion on his privacy. This is not a final resolution of Grady's claim.
What this does not decide
The Court decided only that attaching a monitoring device to a person's body is a search. It did not decide whether North Carolina's lifelong satellite-monitoring program is actually unreasonable or unconstitutional -- that question is left for the North Carolina courts to address on remand.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court relied on its rule from United States v. Jones that when the government physically intrudes on a person or their property to gather information, a Fourth Amendment 'search' has occurred without needing to ask whether the person expected privacy.
- It extended this physical-intrusion rule, which it had also applied in Florida v. Jardines to a drug-sniffing dog on a porch, to conclude that physically attaching a tracking device to a person's body to monitor their movements is likewise a search.
- The Court rejected the North Carolina courts' reasoning that the monitoring program fell outside the Fourth Amendment merely because it was labeled a civil proceeding rather than a criminal one, noting that the Fourth Amendment's protections are not limited to criminal investigations.
- The Court found that the monitoring statute itself, which requires continuous tracking of a person's location and reporting of violations, shows the program is designed to obtain information, satisfying the purpose element of a search.
- Having established that the monitoring program is a search, the Court explained that a search is only unconstitutional if it is unreasonable, a separate question that depends on weighing the purpose of the search against the intrusion on privacy.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. Jones (565 U. S. ___)
The Court relied on Jones's rule that physically intruding to gather information is itself a Fourth Amendment search.
Reaffirms Florida v. Jardines (569 U. S. ___)
The Court used Jardines's application of the physical-intrusion search rule to extend it to body-worn monitors.