E.D.Mo.: Pre-Jones GPS was not suppressed because of the officers’ good faith

Pre-Jones GPS was not suppressed because of the officers’ good faith. United States v. Robinson, 903 F. Supp. 2d 766 (E.D. Mo. 2012):

In light of the Supreme Court’s opinions in Knotts and Karo, as interpreted and applied by the Ninth Circuit in Pineda-Moreno, the Seventh Circuit in Garcia, and subsequently by the Eighth Circuit in Marquez, the undersigned concludes that the agents acted in objective, reasonable reliance on binding precedent when they installed and used the GPS tracker device. As such, the evidence obtained by using the GPS tracker device should not be suppressed. See Davis, 131 S. Ct. at 2429 (noting that “in 27 years of practice under Leon’s good-faith exception, [the Supreme Court has] never applied the exclusionary rule to suppress evidence obtained as a result of nonculpable, innocent police conduct” (citation omitted)).

In this case, the relevant binding precedent was not factually identical and was ultimately distinguished by the Court in Jones. But the agents’ ultimately erroneous interpretation of Supreme Court precedent was no more culpable than if they had relied on factually identical Supreme Court precedent that was later overturned. See id. at 2439 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (noting that an officer is not “more culpable where circuit precedent is simply suggestive rather than ‘binding,’ where it only describes how to treat roughly analogous instances, or where it just does not exist”). As evidenced by the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits’ holdings, the agents’ interpretation of binding precedent was reasonable; the agents did not exploit an unanswered or disputed question of law. Cf. United States v. Johnson, 457 U.S. 537, 561 (1982) (“Official awareness of the dubious constitutionality of a practice would be counterbalanced by official certainty that, so long as the Fourth Amendment law in the area remained unsettled, evidence obtained through the questionable practice would be excluded only in the one case definitively resolving the unsettled question.”). See also Davis, 131 S. Ct. at 2435 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (recognizing that although the court of appeals required the “precedent on a given point [to be] unequivocal,” the majority in Davis left this issue unresolved).