OTHER ACTION
Also Monday, the Supreme Court:
• Denied an appeal from former California high school students who were ordered to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out during a celebration of the Cinco de Mayo holiday at school. The justices did not comment in leaving in place an appellate ruling that found school officials acted appropriately because their concerns about racial violence outweighed students’ freedom of expression rights.
• Agreed to hear Kansas’ appeal seeking to reinstate death sentences for two brothers convicted of robbing and forcing four people engage in sex acts before being shot to death naked in a Wichita soccer field in 2000. The also agreed to review a separate Kansas Supreme Court decision overturning the death sentence of a man convicted of killing a couple in Great Bend in 2004. The Kansas court has not upheld a death sentence since a new capital punishment law was enacted in 1994.
From news services
A North Carolina program of monitoring sex offenders by GPS needs closer judicial scrutiny, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
In an unsigned and unanimous decision that could rattle a number of states, the court rejected North Carolina’s arguments and concluded the ankle-bracelet monitoring program amounts to a search. The decision means convicted felons like Torrey Dale Grady can now challenge the lifelong monitoring.
“That conclusion, however, does not decide the ultimate question of the program’s constitutionality,” the court stated, noting that “the Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches.”
North Carolina judges must now re-examine the GPS monitoring program through a Fourth Amendment lens. Whether it’s permitted, the high court explained Monday, depends on “the nature and purpose of the search and the extent to which the search intrudes upon reasonable privacy expectations.”
Luke Everett, one of the Durham, N.C.-based defense attorneys who petitioned the Supreme Court on Grady’s behalf, said in an email Monday that the court’s decision could prove “very significant” beyond his specific case.
“North Carolina and other states have basically taken the position that they can strap a GPS monitoring device to whomever they want to,” Everett said. “The court here is saying, no, that search has to be reasonable. In many cases, that’s going to be impossible to demonstrate.”
Other states that impose lifelong GPS monitoring requirements on released sexual offenders include California, Florida and Kansas, and dozens of other states require some form of electronic monitoring.
Grady was indicted in 2006 in New Hanover County, N.C., for statutory rape and taking indecent liberties with a child. He pleaded guilty to one count was sentenced to serve between 31 and 38 months in prison. He was released in 2009.
Grady, who is now 36, had previously been convicted of a second-degree sexual offense in 1997. The two convictions made him a recidivist under North Carolina law, leading to a judge’s determination in 2013 that he was subject to GPS monitoring for the rest of his life.
North Carolina officials had urged the Supreme Court not to consider Grady’s petition, arguing in part that an insufficient factual record made it impossible “to balance the state’s perceived need to monitor sex offenders and the intrusions, if any, on (Grady) and other sex offenders like him.”
“We’ll keep fighting to use technology to keep communities safe from the worst offenders,” North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said in a statement.
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