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"Technology and its impact on the Fourth Amendment Criminal Procedure"

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Technology and its impact on the Fourth Amendment Criminal Procedure, By Timothy P. O’Neill in the Chicago Law Bulletin: Let’s set the Wayback Machine to 1983. You are in a law school classroom and are discussing a brand new U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). The professor says, “This case holds that police use of a beeper to track a suspect’s car to a drug lab is not a search under the Fourth Amendment. In order for police activity to constitute a search, it must intrude on the person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Here the car was always on public streets; theoretically, any person could have viewed the suspect’s movements. Use of the beeper only aided the officer’s ability to track those public movements...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on September 11, 2010 (boomark / email).