With the increasing advancements made in technology comes unique challenges for courts in Michigan and across the country. Technology has made it even easier for police to discover facts about people they suspect of committing a crime. In some cases, their use of the technology may however cross some boundaries as we discussed in a prior post about GPS surveillance.

The prior post reported the advent of the U.S. Supreme Court's hearing of a drug crimes case in which police used GPS surveillance to track a suspect. The issue in the case was that the police never obtained a warrant to place the tracking device on the suspect's car.

The Supreme Court in fact heard the case and announced its ruling on Monday, Jan. 23, 2012. The court ruled that the police violated the suspect's rights when they placed the tracking device on his vehicle without obtaining a warrant based on probable cause. The decision had the result of reversing the conviction for the man accused in the case.

The decision was not only made in favor of the convicted man, but it was made unanimously. The justices made the decision unanimously, but they did differ on the reasoning behind the decision. The 5-4 difference in reasoning was over whether all GPS tracking was unconstitutional or simply some warrantless uses.

Alito wrote that "society's expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not -- and indeed, in the main, simply could not -- secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual's car for a very long period."

Source: The Washington Post, "Supreme Court: Warrants needed in GPS tracking," Robert Barnes, Jan. 23, 2012