SBM Is an Unreasonable Search in Grady’s Case

In Grady v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 1368 (2015), the Supreme Court held that North Carolina’s satellite-based monitoring regime for sex offenders is a search, but left it to North Carolina’s courts to decide whether it is an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. We got an answer for one defendant this week, as Torrey Grady’s case circled back through the court of appeals. Phil and I have written about Grady a lot, so I won’t go through a full recap of the facts. Torrey Grady is a recidivist sex offender who was ordered to enroll in lifetime SBM in 2013. He appealed to the court of appeals, arguing that SBM violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches. The court of appeals rejected the argument on the theory that SBM was part of the civil regulatory scheme. The Supreme Court of the United States eventually granted certiorari and reversed, noting that civil regimes, too, can include searches within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The Court remanded the case to North Carolina for a determination of whether, given the “totality of the circumstances, including the nature and purpose of the search and the extent to which [it] intrudes upon reasonable privacy expectations,” SBM is a reasonable search. Grady, 135 S. Ct. at 1371. We know from cases decided after Grady that the State bears the burden of proving that SBM is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. State v. Blue, __ N.C. App. __, 783 [...]