When it comes to monitoring sex offenders, North Carolina will soon be forced to clarify how it integrates tracking technology with constitutional rights under the law.
The use of tracking devices on people has been challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court — which released an unsigned, unanimous ruling Monday saying that devices constitute a search, based on previous cases where a location tracking device was involved.
North Carolina is one of a large majority of states that monitors offenders with tracking devices.
Torrey Dale Grady, a North Carolina sex offender, was convicted of two sex crimes — first in 1997 and then in 2006. Ordered to wear a tracking device for the rest of his life, Grady contested that wearing the device violates his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches.
“It’s important to have cases like these because as technology develops, it sort of bucks back against constitutional rights, especially Fourth Amendment rights,” said Mark L. Hayes, a Durham lawyer who represented Grady throughout the case.
The case moved through the N.C. Court of Appeals and the N.C. Supreme Court, with both legal bodies deciding that Grady wearing the tracking device did not constitute a search. In late 2014, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Grady was co-represented by Hayes and Luke Everett, a Chapel Hill lawyer.
It is now up to North Carolina courts to decide if the search is unreasonable and violates Grady’s Fourth Amendment rights.
“This is a good opportunity for the state to reconsider its position,” said Deborah Weissman, a professor at UNC’s law school. “One size does not fit all, and there is something about the way in which we approach sex offenses and offenders that is not based on research or reason.
The nonprofit International Association of Chiefs of Police released a report in 2008 showing that tracking devices combat prison crowding by providing alternatives to incarceration, give law enforcement greater control over offenders and help reintegrate them into society.
