Another state court of appeals on Friday saw no problem with police attaching a GPS tracking device to an automobile without first obtaining a warrant from a judge. Idaho’s second highest court denied the appeal of Filip Danney who was convicted on marijuana charges based on evidence gained from the spying device.
In March 2007, Ada County Detective Matt Taddicken received an anonymous tip about Danney and decided to investigate. Two months later, he went to Danney’s work and placed a GPS tracker on Danney’s parked car. Within a few days, the device showed Danney was returning to Boise from a trip to Arcata, California. This was enough to have Taddicken order Danney stopped and searched. Ada County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Matthew Clifford claimed that Danney failed to “signal for five seconds prior to changing lanes,” and used this as a reason to pull him over. While Danney was detained, a drug dog was brought in to search the vehicle. The dog found the marijuana.
At trial, Danney objected to the stop on the grounds that an insufficient scientific foundation was laid for the GPS evidence. On appeal, he attempted to argue that the warrantless search violated his constitutional rights, but the appellate court rejected his assertion citing the three-part test created by a July decision of the state supreme court.
“We conclude that Danney’s argument that the warrantless use of a GPS device to track his vehicle violated the Fourth Amendment does not demonstrate fundamental error because the second prong, requiring that the error ‘plainly exists,’ was not met,” Chief Judge Karen L. Lansing wrote for the majority.
The court found that a plain error cannot exist on a topic where the court has never ruled and there is room for doubt regarding the issue’s outcome.
“The law is not settled on whether use of a GPS device to track a vehicle’s movements constitutes a ‘search’ subject to the strictures of the Fourth Amendment,” Lansing wrote. “Neither the United States Supreme Court nor Idaho appellate courts have spoken to this issue, nor have the vast majority of the federal circuit courts. To the extent that it has been addressed, the jurisprudence in this area is conflicting.”
As a result, the court let stand the district court ruling allowing the GPS evidence. Judge Sergio A. Gutierrez disagreed with the majority’s reasoning.
“Even assuming the GPS evidence was constitutionally obtained, or as the majority concludes, not fundamental error that we can review on appeal, it was much too general to link Danney to criminal drug activity,” Gutierrez wrote in a dissent. “As Danney points out, there was no evidence presented that it was Danney who drove the truck to California, nor that the driver had frequented a known drug location in Arcata or the surrounding area. Moreover, Detective Taddicken did not testify with specificity as to when the vehicle left for Arcata, whether it stopped anywhere during the trip, when it arrived in Arcata, or why he believed Arcata was a ‘hotbed’ of marijuana activity… As a result, the officers’ reliance on an admittedly pretextual traffic stop to further investigate their hunch regarding Danney’s drug activity appears, in this instance, to be an effort to circumvent the protections afforded by our federal and state constitutions against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Source: 
Idaho v. Danney (Court of Appeals, State of Idaho, 11/5/2010)
[Courtesy: Thenewspaper.com]
The guy was, in fact, smuggling drugs.
From Arcata? Really?
The guy was, in fact, smuggling drugs.
But that’s not the issue here.
I thought the dissenting judge had it right. If the cops had taken what they had to a judge and asked for a warrant, they would not have gotten one. They did not have enough for a warrant.
The cops knew that. So they chose instead to go through the charade of a traffic stop. And the two judges here bought that.
As a long-time lawyer, I should by now not be surprised by these kind of decisions. But I still am surprised. And disappointed. Makes me cynical about the justice of our criminal courts.
By the way, why is marijuana still considered a dangerous drug in this country? A cigarette smoker leads this country from the White House, and we still pay billions of dollars in police and prison resources to punish people who smoke a little weed. What a waste.
It’s cool to just track people? Awesome. Time to start placing GPS tracking devices on un-attended police cars and selling positional data as a subscription service.
And donuts!
“Ada County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Matthew Clifford claimed that Danney failed to “signal for five seconds prior to changing lanes,” and used this as a reason to pull him over.”
If black boxes are ever mandated on cars, flimsy excuses for traffic stops such as ‘failed to signal’ or ‘driving too slowly’ could be disproven later by the data recorder.
I still oppose such OBD-Stazi devices but it’s good to see invasive measures as GPS tracking and black box recorders might cancel each other out.
Just like a little cell phone video recorder can tip the scales of justice back in favor of the presumed innocent civilian.
I’m sure that within my lifetime all vehicles will be equipped with gps trackers. It won’t be mandatory, unless I want insurance and then it will be. And 50% of the country will see nothing wrong with this because according to them, if you aren’t doing anything illegal you have nothing to worry about.
Meaning the other 50% are doing something illegal? Sounds about right…
Hmmm…
(2) A signal of intention to turn or move right or left when required shall be given continuously to warn other traffic. On controlled-access highways and before turning from a parked position, the signal shall be given continuously for not less than five (5) seconds and, in all other instances, for not less than the last one hundred (100) feet traveled by the vehicle before turning.
Am I reading correctly that on controlled access highways (so, Interstates, correct?) that you must signal for 5 seconds before changing lanes? If that is right, then all of those 3-blink cars I suspect violate this 5 second rule.
Also seems odd to me that for a 5 second traffic stop, a driver be detained and car searched. Over a minor violation such as this? With only suspicion being that GPS said he went somewhere in California?
I don’t like any of this stuff. I’m also surprised that they can come onto (what I assume is) private property as his office and place a tracking device on his car. Can they also enter your driveway? How about your private garage?
Actually, we might as well place GPS trackers on every car. Next time I drive to the South Side, Chicago police can stop me because I’m white and I must be down in the evil hood only to buy drugs. Oh, and I forgot to signal for 5 seconds before I swerved around a massive pothole can be the excuse to pull me over.
The suspicion came from the anonymous tip. The trip to California fed into that a bit, and the traffic stop was admittedly a pretext to call out the dog.
Not mentioned in this is whether the cops are looking to seize the car or any other property associated with the bust. Cynically, I guess, it seems to me that forfeiture of assets is what drives most “law enforcement” of this type.
It’s nice to know that illiterate grade school dropouts can get jobs on the Idaho Court of Appeals. Makes me have hope for all the other unemployed illiterates out there.
@ MikeAR…wow we do have some common ground… I thought we fought wars just so this sort of $hit wouldn’t happen.
I’m sure these guys completed law school. Probably got good grades as well. And with it, according to progressive lore, earned their “right” to harass others. For the benefit of some mythical “The People”, of course.
I know you meant well, but your statement indicates you have fallen for the nonsense that some sort of officially bestowed degree matters one iota whatsoever. It never did, and it never will, regardless of how convenient pretending it does makes it for reliably retarded, privileged progressives to bestow advantages on their brood, while hooting and hollering about how privilege is “different this time”, since we’re living in a “meritocracy.”
What an abortion of justice. Where’s that Z71 fellow that likes to sniff cop jock? I wonder where he stands on this.
So if it was justified because “He was, in fact, smuggling drugs…”, then it is also true that we could justify anything, anything at all, to net a perp. How novel…. to be a nation of men rather than a nation of laws. If the whole nation of law thing has simply failed to live up to people’s expectations, then the security weenie faction has won.
As for putting tracking devices on cop cars, a couple in Phoenix were arrested and thrown in jail on felony trespass, public endangerment, and racketeering charges for doing it as a protest to the new trend, and publishing daily maps of police activities. Of course, it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that one of the tagged police cars was parked nearly half of every shift outside of the county….