Revised Sex Offender Flow Chart (March 2015 edition)

It’s time to post an updated sex offender and monitoring flow chart. I was going to do it last week, but I’m glad I didn’t. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed North Carolina’s appellate courts on an issue that may impact the constitutionality of SBM. The new chart, available here, incorporates Grady v. North Carolina and includes several other changes. In Grady v. North Carolina, the Court held per curiam that satellite based monitoring is a search under the analytical framework set out in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. __ (2012), and Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. __ (2013). The Court held that North Carolina’s appellate courts erred when they concluded in an earlier case that those precedents did not apply to SBM because it, unlike criminal investigations in Jones and Jardines, is a civil regime. See State v. Jones, __ N.C. App. __, 750 S.E.2d 883 (2013). The Court disagreed, noting that “the Fourth Amendment’s protection extends beyond the sphere of criminal investigations” and covers things like civil safety inspections and other administrative searches. Slip. Op. at 3–4. Having concluded that SBM is a search, the Court remanded the case to North Carolina for a determination of the “ultimate question” of whether it is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Grady is noted near the bottom of the second page of the flow chart in the section entitled Constitutional Issues. I may need to update the chart again, depending on how things progress on remand. Findings that may trump a [...]