Groups seek to overturn ruling allowing warrantless phone tracking
A coalition of civil liberties groups has asked a federal appeals court to revisit a recent ruling that held the police did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they tracked suspect Melvin Skinner's cell phone without a warrant.
The brief argues that a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had misunderstood both the relevant Supreme Court precedents and the technical details of how the police had accomplished the tracking. The groups -- the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology -- want the case re-heard by a panel of all Sixth Circuit judges. The legal arguments in the case center on US v. Jones, a Supreme Court decision from earlier this year that found it unconstitutional to attach a GPS device to a car and track it for 28 days without a warrant. In contrast, the police tracked Skinner using the GPS in his cell phone instead of attaching a separate GPS device to his car. And they tracked him for only 3 days rather than 28.