Lesson Title: The Fourth Amendment
Grade Level(s): 11
Author: Carrie Kemmett, University of Toledo
Date: June 7, 2012
Lesson Summary:
Students in grade 11 will learn about the fourth amendment rights of the U.S. Constitution.
Students will further explore the fourth amendment through the court case U.S. v. Jones.
Materials Needed:
1. Video clip from “U.S. v. Jones: How We Got There and What We Learned”
2. Fourth Amendment FAQ’s (handout)
3. Fourth Amendment and Student Rights (handout)
4. The Washington Post article: “Supreme Court: Warrants Needed in GPS Tracking”
Lesson Implementation:
Engage:
Begin with a discussion using the following guiding questions:
Why is privacy in the United States so important?
What privacy rights do you think you have in the U.S. Constitution?
Provide an overview of the fourth amendment and what rights are protected by this
amendment in the Constitution. Review the “Fourth Amendment FAQ’s” handout.
Explore:
Students will explore the fourth amendment by examining a recent court case U.S. v. Jones.
Distribute copies of The Washington Post Article “Supreme Court: Warrants Needed in GPS
Tracking”. After the students read the article, play the knowledgestream video clip # 1 from
“ U.S. v. Jones: How We Got There and What We Learned”.
Explain:
As a class, student will discuss the case and analyze how the fourth amendment is interpreted in
the 21st century.
Evaluate:
Students will write a short 1 page response to the following question:
Do you think the constitution needs to be updated to reflect the changes in society. Are there
any amendments you can cite as an example?
Extend:
Students will explore fourth amendment rights as a student by reading the handout “ The
Fourth Amendment in Public Schools” (PDF file) and discuss as a class.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the Fourth Amendment
By Wendy Bay Lewis
Q. Does the Fourth Amendment prevent businesses and neighbors from invading an
individual’s privacy? A. No. Although other privacy laws enacted by Congress and state
legislatures may place some limits on what private corporations and individuals can do, the Fourth
Amendment itself applies only to governmental searches and seizures. For example, there are many
state and federal laws that protect some aspects of an individual’s right to privacy in his or her
medical records. To learn more about these laws, visit the Coalition for Patient Rights
[http://www.nationalcpr.org/] and the Health Privacy Project [http://www.healthprivacy.org/].
Q. Does the Fourth Amendment protect an individual’s privacy in the workplace? A. No.
Unless an employer promises otherwise, employees should assume that the employer is regularly
reviewing incoming and outgoing phone calls (including voice mail), copying and reviewing every email sent or received, tracing every Web site visited, and viewing every document created on the
company's computers. Employers are not required to notify employees about this surveillance. To
learn more about individuals’ rights in the workplace, visit the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
[http://www.privacyrights.org/index.htm].
Q. Can students be searched by their teachers? A. Yes. The Fourth Amendment applies to
searches conducted by teachers as well as police officers. Therefore, if a teacher conducts a search,
s/he must have a strong reason to believe there is evidence the student violated a school rule or broke
the law.
Q. Can students be searched at school by police officers? A. Yes. Under the Fourth Amendment,
however, police generally are required to obtain a warrant showing that there is probable cause to
believe that the student committed a crime. There are special circumstances when a warrant is not
required, for example, if the officer believes the student has a firearm.
Q. Can evidence obtained in school searches be used in a criminal case against a student? A.
Yes, provided the evidence was obtained legally. If a teacher or police officer obtains evidence in
violation of the Fourth Amendment, the evidence is inadmissible in court. For example, a teacher
cannot conduct a strip search (requiring the student to undress) when a pat-down search would be
sufficient to look for a weapon. Any evidence obtained during the strip search would therefore be
inadmissible in court.
Q. Can schools require students to submit to urine tests for illegal drugs? A. Sometimes. The
Supreme Court has upheld drug testing of student athletes on the basis that they are school leaders
whom other students emulate, and that they relinquish some of their right to privacy when they
participate in team sports. However, schools cannot require random testing of all students.
From Insights on Law & Society, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 2001), American Bar Association.
Supreme Court: Warrants needed in GPS tracking
By Robert Barnes, Published: January 23
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously restricted the police’s ability to use a GPS device
to track criminal suspects in a first test of how privacy rights will be protected in the digital age.
The court rejected the government’s view that long-term surveillance of a suspect by GPS
tracking is no different than traditional, low-tech forms of monitoring. But its decision was
nuanced and incremental, leaving open the larger questions of how government may use the
information generated by modern technology for surveillance purposes.
Still, the decision reversing the conviction of suspected D.C. drug kingpin Antoine Jones was a
“landmark ruling in applying the Fourth Amendment’s protections to advances in surveillance
technology,” said Washington lawyer Andrew Pincus, who filed a brief on Jones’s behalf.
The court without dissent agreed that prosecutors violated Jones’s rights when they attached a
GPS device to his Jeep and monitored his movements for 28 days. In one of the Washington
region’s most celebrated drug trials, the nightclub owner was convicted and sentenced to life in
prison.
But while all the justices agreed with that outcome, they split 5 to 4 in their reasoning.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority that it was the attachment of the device that
violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of
that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’ ” Scalia wrote.
Scalia did not hold that a warrant was always necessary. But Walter Dellinger, who helped
represent Jones at the Supreme Court, said the decision means that any use of GPS technology
by law enforcement without a warrant “would be a risky undertaking.”
Scalia’s limited ruling was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M.
Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor. Scalia said that electronic surveillance, if
achieved without having to physically trespass on a person’s property, still may be “an
unconstitutional invasion of privacy.”
He said there was “no reason for rushing forward” to resolve more complicated issues than those
presented in Jones’s case.
But it was those difficult questions — about society’s expectation of privacy in an increasingly
technological world — that had animated the court’s consideration of the case. In an intense
hour-long oral argument in November, the Big Brother of George Orwell’s novel “1984” was
referenced six times.
In separate opinions, Sotomayor and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote of the sweeping changes
technology has brought to society that do not involve government intrusions.
“In the course of carrying out mundane tasks,” Sotomayor wrote, Americans disclose the phone
numbers they dial, the URLs they visit, “the books, groceries and medications they purchase.”
Alito wrote of toll booths that record a motorist’s travels, cars that come ready to broadcast their
locations and 322 million wireless devices in use nationally.
Alito said that the court should have more clearly addressed some of those innovations instead of
deciding a case about a “21st-century surveillance technique” by using “18th-century tort law.”
“The court’s reasoning largely disregards what is really important (the use of a GPS for the
purpose of long-term tracking) and instead attaches great significance to something that most
would view as relatively minor (attaching to the bottom of a car a small, light object that does
not interfere in any way with the car’s operation),” Alito wrote.
Alito’s point was that “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses
impinges on expectations of privacy.”
“For such offenses,” he wrote, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and
others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue
every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan.
The key to the court’s more narrow decision on the case seemed to be Sotomayor. She praised
Alito’s “incisively” written concurrence and expressed the most concern about the loss of
personal privacy. But she said the government’s intrusion on Jones’s property was enough to
decide the case, and “resolution of these difficult questions” could wait.
The Supreme Court’s decision Monday upheld a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D. C.
Circuit that said Jones’s conviction must be reversed — although it, like Alito, was concerned
about the length of the surveillance. Jones remains imprisoned while prosecutors decide whether
to retry him.
Law enforcement could have avoided the issue in 2005 if officers had more closely followed the
instructions of a judge who issued a warrant authorizing the use of the GPS device. The judge
said it had to be installed within 10 days while Jones’s Jeep was in Washington. Instead, it was
installed after 11 days, while the vehicle was in Maryland.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is carefully reviewing the court’s
opinion and evaluating its options,” a spokesman said in a statement. “Beyond that, the office has
no comment at this time.”
A. Eduardo Balarezo, who represented Jones in his initial case and his retrial, said the GPS
evidence was “highly critical” to the government’s case because it linked Jones to a Fort
Washington stash house, where police and FBI agents found nearly $1 million in cash almost
100 kilos of cocaine.
The case is United States v. Jones .
Staff writer Keith Alexander contributed to this report.