Prior art
Most of the tracking already exists
Hyper-tracking of people convicted of sex offences, with geofenced exclusion zones around schools and parks, is not a proposal. It is statute, it has been litigated for twenty years, and the litigation is the useful part.
If you pitch continuous GPS monitoring as the innovation, the first person in the room who works in corrections will tell you their state has been doing it since 2005. Knowing exactly what exists is what lets you point at the part that does not.
The statutes this would build on
Florida — the Jessica Lunsford Act
In 2005 Florida enacted a 25-year mandatory minimum and lifetime electronic monitoring for certain offences against children under 12.
This is the origin of the modern American electronic-monitoring model for sex offences: a mandatory minimum on the front end and lifetime electronic monitoring on the back end, tied to the age of the victim.
Jessica Lunsford Act, ch. 2005-28, Laws of Florida; see Fla. Stat. §§ 947.1405, 948.30
California — Jessica’s Law
In 2006 California voters approved lifetime GPS monitoring for felony registrants and a 2,000-foot residency restriction.
The monitoring provision survives. The residency restriction largely did not: in 2015 California’s Supreme Court held Jessica’s Law’s blanket 2,000-foot residency restriction unconstitutional as applied to San Diego County parolees. Blanket geography lost; individualised conditions did not.
Proposition 83 (2006); Cal. Penal Code §§ 3004(b), 3003.5(b)
In re Taylor, 60 Cal. 4th 1019 (2015)
The pattern across twenty years of litigation
Courts have repeatedly upheld monitoring imposed as part of a sentence, on an individualised basis, with a defined duration. They have repeatedly struck down blanket geographic rules applied to a whole class retroactively. Every design decision in this document is downstream of that single distinction.
The controlling decisions
Four cases you have to design around
Not a literature review. These four are the ones that decide whether a proposed programme exists in five years.
| Case | Holding | What it means for this design |
|---|---|---|
| Grady v. North Carolina 575 U.S. 306 (2015) |
Attaching a device to a person’s body to track their movements is a search under the Fourth Amendment. Remanded for a reasonableness determination. | The band on the monitored adult is a search. It needs a justification proportionate to the individual, not a class. It cannot be defended as “merely civil”. |
| Smith v. Doe 538 U.S. 84 (2003) |
Retroactive registration and notification upheld as civil regulation rather than punishment. | This is why people assume retroactivity is fine. It covers registration. It is routinely over-read to cover monitoring, and that over-reading is what loses. |
| Does #1–5 v. Snyder 834 F.3d 696 (6th Cir. 2016) |
Michigan’s retroactive registry amendments — school exclusion zones in particular — were punitive in effect, and so violated the Ex Post Facto Clause. | The single most important case here. Exclusion zones applied retroactively is the exact combination that failed. |
| Belleau v. Wall 811 F.3d 929 (7th Cir. 2016) |
Lifetime GPS monitoring upheld against Fourth Amendment and ex post facto challenge for a civilly committed offender on release. | Included because it cuts the other way. The law is not settled, it is jurisdictional, and a design that only cites the cases it likes will be taken apart. |
Also relevant: 2019 North Carolina’s Supreme Court held lifetime satellite-based monitoring unreasonable as applied to a recidivist no longer under supervision. — 2017 the Supreme Court struck down a ban on registrants accessing social media. — 2020 a district court holding that registry effects amounted to cruel and unusual punishment was reversed on appeal.
State v. Grady, 372 N.C. 509, 831 S.E.2d 542 (2019)
Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. 98 (2017)
Millard v. Rankin, 265 F. Supp. 3d 1211 (D. Colo. 2017), rev’d sub nom. Millard v. Camper, 971 F.3d 1174 (10th Cir. 2020)
So what is actually new
Set against all of the above, the concept’s genuine contributions are narrow and worth being precise about:
- A device on the child, not only a geofence around a building. Every deployed scheme draws boundaries around fixed places. A boundary that travels with the child is a different capability, and it is the one that covers a park, a car park, a shop, a bus.
- A wearable a child will keep on. Not a court-ordered ankle box. This is an industrial design and adoption problem, and it decides whether any of the rest matters.
- Two-sided matching that reveals nothing to a server. Existing monitoring reports a subject’s position to a central system continuously. The scheme on the data flow page does the matching on the child’s device and tells no one anything unless a threshold is crossed.
Do not lead with the tracking
The tracking is prior art with a twenty-year litigation history attached. Leading with it invites every objection already raised against every existing programme, and offers nothing in exchange. Lead with the three items above.