WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a North Carolina sex offender should have another chance to challenge an order that he wear a GPS monitoring bracelet around the clock and for the rest of his life.
The justices said the state's highest court must reconsider whether North Carolina violated Torrey Dale Grady's constitutional rights when it ordered him to wear the ankle bracelet beginning in 2013.
North Carolina is among at least eight states that have a system for lifetime monitoring for convicted sex offenders.
Grady was convicted of a second-degree sex offense in 1997 and then again of taking indecent liberties with a child in 2006. The second conviction qualified Grady as a repeat offender. After serving nearly three years in prison, Grady was ordered to start wearing the GPS bracelet 24 hours a day in 2013 so officials could keep track of his movements.
Grady argued the state's lifetime GPS monitoring system is unreasonable because it allows state officials to enter his home -- with or without his permission -- to maintain a GPS monitoring base station. Grady also says that he must charge the bracelet every day by plugging it into a wall outlet for four to six hours at a time.
State courts rejected his claims, but the Supreme Court said the monitoring qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures and likened it to its case on GPS devices three years ago.
"The state's program is plainly designed to obtain information," the court said in an unsigned opinion. "And since it does so by physically intruding on a subject's body, it effects a Fourth Amendment search."
In 2012, the court ruled that placing the tracking units on cars to follow their movement is a search. That case did not decide whether attaching the devices without a search warrant violated the Constitution. On Monday, the justices said in their unsigned opinion that the state court should weigh whether North Carolina's tracking of sex offenders is reasonable.
State officials argued Grady's complaints are based on outdated descriptions of the monitoring program. They said he presented no evidence of the interruptions to his daily life, how often officials must visit his home or what use North Carolina makes of the information it collects from the ankle bracelet.
Virginia redistricting
Also Monday, the Supreme Court said a federal judicial panel must take another look at its ruling that Virginia state lawmakers packed too many black voters into one congressional district.
The justices ordered the three-judge panel to review the case in light of the high court's ruling last week in an Alabama redistricting case. In the Alabama case, the justices said a lower court failed to consider claims that the new districts limited minority-group voting power.
In a 2-1 ruling last year, the panel said that the Republican-controlled General Assembly packed too many black voters into Virginia's black-majority 3rd Congressional District to make adjacent districts safer for GOP incumbents. The panel initially ordered state legislators to redraw new boundaries by April 1, but that requirement was lifted after eight current and former Republican congressmen appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.
Kansas death case
Justices agreed Monday to hear Kansas' appeal seeking to reinstate death sentences for two brothers convicted of robbing and forcing four people to engage in sex acts before being shot to death naked in a Wichita soccer field in 2000.
The court also agreed to review a separate Kansas Supreme Court decision overturning the death sentence of a man convicted of killing a couple in Great Bend in 2004.
The justices said they will review the Kansas high court's rulings that threw out the sentences of Jonathan and Reginald Carr and Sidney Gleason. The Kansas court hasn't upheld a death sentence since a new capital punishment law was enacted in 1994. The state's last executions, by hanging, took place in 1965.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider instructions given to jurors in the sentencing phase of capital trials about evidence favorable to the defendants, as well as whether sentencing the Carr brothers together violated their rights.
Appeal case denied
The court denied an appeal from former California high school students who were ordered to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out during a celebration of the Cinco de Mayo holiday at school.
The justices did not comment Monday in leaving in place an appellate ruling that found that school officials acted appropriately because their concerns about racial violence outweighed students' freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would inflame the passions of Hispanic students celebrating the Mexican holiday.
The onetime students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., argued school officials gave a "heckler's veto" to the objecting students.
Church appeal rebuffed
Justices again rejected an appeal from a small evangelical church in the Bronx seeking to overturn New York City's ban on after-hours religious worship services at public schools.
The justices did not comment Monday in siding with the city's Department of Education in a long-running fight over the separation of church and state in the nation's largest public school system.
The Bronx Household of Faith held Sunday services at P.S. 15 for 12 years, until last summer, when the church completed its own building near the school. But the church said it still needs extra space for events that include religious services.
The Supreme Court has twice before rejected the church's appeal in a lawsuit spanning 18 years.
Information for this article was contributed by Roxana Hegeman and staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 03/31/2015