Virginia’s highest court has heard arguments about whether to overturn the conviction of a Fairfax County sex offender who was apprehended after police used a GPS to monitor his movements without obtaining a search warrant.
David L. Foltz was convicted of abduction with intent to defile in 2008. The Virginia Court of Appeals has upheld that conviction twice, saying police didn’t violate Foltz’s privacy rights by putting a GPS on his car while officers were investigating him in a series of sexual assaults.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in January that investigators cannot install a GPS device on a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant, in a case involving a D.C. nightclub owner being tracked in a drug-trafficking case.
Christopher Leibig, an attorney for Foltz, told the Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday that his client’s conviction should be reversed and the GPS evidence was inadmissible, according to the Associated Press. Virginia Theisen of the state Attorney General’s Office argued that the conviction should stand and police gathered evidence by conventional methods, the AP reported.
