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Is GPS Tracking Data Admissible in Court?

Law enforcement has been using GPS tracking for years to catch or keep tabs on the bad guys. The tech is durable enough for use in the field, and it’s highly efficient in terms of both money and time. GPS tracking also doubles as a safety feature—when you’ve placed a tracker on the vehicle of a highly dangerous criminal, you don’t need to stick as close until the point of arrest. Police do like the trackers, but today a battle is being fought over how much the tracking data is appreciated by the court.

GPS tracking data is one of the key pieces of evidence in one trial taking place in Baltimore. Here a 17-year-old accused of murder has pointed to location data from a police GPS tracking device that seems to show him in another area of town when the shootings probably occurred.

Unfortunately, the device’s manufacturer has stated in court that the exact times logged on the data record cannot be certain. The court must decide if the data can be admitted, and if so, what exactly it indicates. Complicating matters is the fact that the teen knowingly left his GPS tracker at home on many occasions, leaving police to wonder if he really was where the tech said he was. What now is questionable is not the technology itself, but rather its implementation by the parole system.

Courts certainly have acknowledged the reliability of GPS tracking data when it was clear that the tech was carefully used. In 2009, evidence from a tracker helped convict one man of murder. His wife had been suspicious of his unexplained activities for months, so she secretly installed a GPS tracking device on his vehicle. The data from those logs contradicted his testimony regarded the death his 12-year-old babysitter. Investigators used the evidence to determine the time and place of the murder, and he was quickly convicted.

With few exceptions, the actual reliability of GPS tracking data is unquestioned. While it can be jammed, faked, or otherwise disrupted, a closed system of evidence handling—common to all other forms of admissible data—can reduce the risk of faulty info. What remains to be seen is how effectively law enforcement and other interested parties can use the tech in a consistent and legal way. The true court battle will be what uses of GPS tracking devices do and do not represent a violation of individual privacy.

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