Today the Third Circuit handed down United States v. Katzin, an important cases on three related issues of Fourth Amendment law: first, whether the installation of a GPS device requires a warrant; second, the scope of the Davis good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule; and third, who has standing to suppress the evidence from the physical search of a car following a GPS search.
The divided court ruled in the defendants’ favor on all three issues. First, installation of a GPS device requires a warrant; second, the Davis good-faith exception applies only when there was directly on-point binding appellate precedent allowing the government’s acts; and third, every passenger in the car at the time it is stopped has standing to challenge the fruits of the subsequent physical search. There’s a lot in the Katzin case, so I thought I would blog on the three issues and offer my perspective on them.
I. The Facts
The police were tracking a string of burglaries at Rite-Aid pharmacies across several states, and they came to have very strong suspicion that Katzin and his two brothers were committing the burglaries using Katzin’s van. The police found the van one day, so they called the local U.S. Attorney’s Office. The prosecutors at the office advised them that they could put the GPS device on without a warrant. (This was December 2010, before the Supreme Court’s GPS decision in Jones.) The police attached the GPS device on the car when it was parked on a public road. The device allowed the police to monitor the location of the car in real-time remotely. The GPS device quickly paid off: Just several days after placing the GPS device on the car, the GPS showed the car parked for a few hours right next to a Rite-Aid [...]