The majority opinion in a recent appellate court ruling upheld the government’s use of a geofence warrant to obtain location data from Google in a Virginia bank robbery case. The dissenting opinion, however, argues that the majority failed to uphold the Constitution in their decision.
This fact of modern life—that we cannot predict what developments, and what risks posed by those developments, lie just around the corner—should remind courts to exercise humility.
The majority responded to this specific section of the dissent, stating “it is the dissent that fails to heed its own warning,” Judge Richardson wrote. “Instead of faithfully applying established principles to the case before us, the dissent would have us depart from binding case law and apply a novel, unwieldy multifactor balancing test to reach the dissent’s preferred policy outcome. We decline the invitation. Our Fourth Amendment doctrine compels a clear result here. If one thinks that this result is undesirable on policy grounds, those concerns should be taken to Congress.”
