Grady v. North Carolina

Background

Torrey Dale Grady is a man convicted of a 1997 second-degree sexual offense and a 2006 offense for taking indecent liberties with a child. After serving his sentence, North Carolina ordered him to wear a satellite-based tracking device at all times as part of a recidivist sex-offender monitoring program. Grady argued that forcing him to wear the device without his consent violated the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches. State trial and intermediate appellate courts rejected his claim, relying on a prior state decision that treated ankle monitoring differently from placing a GPS on a car. The North Carolina Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, and Grady asked the high court to review the case.

Reasoning

The Court examined whether attaching a tracking device to a person’s body without consent is a "search." It relied on prior decisions holding that physically attaching tracking devices to property or entering protected areas is a search because the government physically intrudes to get information. The Court read the state statute, which requires continuous time-correlated location tracking and reporting of violations, as showing the program plainly obtains information. It therefore concluded that nonconsensual body-attached monitoring effects a Fourth Amendment search. The Court did not decide whether the search is reasonable in all circumstances and declined to assess that issue on first review. Instead, it vacated the state judgment and sent the case back to the lower courts to determine reasonableness under the totality of the circumstances.

Real world impact

The decision requires courts to treat nonconsensual ankle or body tracking of convicted sex offenders as a search and to evaluate whether such monitoring is reasonable. It does not permanently bar monitoring; lower courts must now weigh privacy intrusions against public-safety goals, and states may need to present evidence or change practices on remand.