Seventh Circuit, Antrim v. Hoy: Wisconsin's lifetime GPS monitoring of repeat sex offenders and the Fourth Amendment

What happened

On November 13, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided Antrim v. Hoy, No. 25-1460, and affirmed summary judgment for Wisconsin's Secretary of Corrections. Alton Antrim, representing a certified class of about 740 people, challenged Wis. Stat. § 301.48(2)(a)(7), which requires lifetime GPS monitoring of people with two or more sex-offense convictions, as a facially unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. The Eastern District of Wisconsin had ruled for the Secretary.

Judge Sykes wrote the opinion for a panel that also included Judges Hamilton and St. Eve. Judge Hamilton joined the opinion and wrote a separate concurrence. There was no dissent.

What the opinion says

The court stated the question narrowly: "All we resolve today is the specific issue presented by Antrim's facial challenge—that is, whether the Fourth Amendment requires an individualized risk assessment anytime a state subjects a repeat sex offender to GPS monitoring. We hold that it does not."

A procedural point on class representation. The court disagreed with the district court's view that Antrim could argue only from his own facts. It held that third-party standing principles "don't foreclose a named class representative from making arguments on behalf of a class," because class members are "bound by and entitled to the benefits" of the judgment, and that any mismatch between the representative and the class is a question under Rule 23, not standing.

The merits. The court noted that the Supreme Court held in Grady v. North Carolina (2015) that monitoring of this kind is a search, but left open whether it is reasonable. Relying on its earlier decisions in Belleau v. Wall (2016) and Braam v. Carr (2022), the latter an earlier ruling in this same case, it held that the program is reasonable: "Repeat sex offenders have 'diminished privacy expectations,' and Wisconsin 'has a strong public-safety interest in monitoring repeat sex offenders' to deter future sex crimes." It added: "The fact that it operates on a categorical basis, rather than case by case, doesn't make it less so," citing Samson v. California (2006).

The court said Antrim's argument "sounds in the overbreadth doctrine," which it described as a First Amendment doctrine with no equivalent in Fourth Amendment law. It declined to adopt Antrim's proposed sliding scale, under which more intrusive searches would need more individualized justification, finding no supporting authority and pointing to Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders (2012). On Antrim's evidence about recidivism and the program's effect, it repeated that it is not the court's role to "pars[e] the latest academic studies on sex-offender recidivism" to second-guess the state's policy judgment.

The court left two questions open: "a future challenge to the disclosure of an offender's location data isn't foreclosed by our decision here. Nor is a future challenge to section 301.48(2)(a)(7) as applied to any particular offender." It did not reach the state's alternative "special needs" argument.

Antrim's arguments and the concurrence

As the opinion records them, Antrim argued that the statute covers a wide range of offenders, some of whom are unlikely to reoffend; that monitoring may be imposed only after an individualized risk assessment and only while a heightened risk lasts; that the state had not used the location data to solve a crime or studied the program's effect; and that the device, its charging, travel limits, stigma and possible public release of location histories under Wisconsin's open-records law impose real burdens.

Judge Hamilton joined the opinion but wrote that since Braam "we have evidence of a feature of the GPS program that raises serious Fourth Amendment problems": the state's position that the tracking data "are public records subject to disclosure upon request to the general public." Citing Wilson v. Layne (1999) and Carpenter v. United States (2018), he wrote that such disclosures "seem hard to reconcile with the Fourth Amendment," while stating that "This case does not require us to answer the Fourth Amendment question conclusively," and suggested that Wisconsin officials "may wish to consider taking steps to avoid these potential Fourth Amendment violations."

Where it sits in the record

The decision is the Seventh Circuit's third ruling upholding Wisconsin's lifetime GPS monitoring law under the Fourth Amendment, after Belleau v. Wall, 811 F.3d 929 (7th Cir. 2016), and Braam v. Carr, 37 F.4th 1269 (7th Cir. 2022). The Supreme Court's Grady v. North Carolina, 575 U.S. 306 (2015), held such monitoring is a search without deciding its reasonableness. The record also holds the Sixth Circuit's November 13, 2026 decision in Doe v. Whitmer, on Michigan's 2021 sex-offender registration law.