Opinion | When a Restraining Order Fails, a GPS Tracker Can Save Lives

Firearms play a significant role in intimate partner homicide. But many states don’t effectively monitor whether a court order to surrender firearms was followed. In order to standardize the process, offenders who are ordered to hand in their firearms should be tracked and those who are noncompliant should be reported to the presiding judge.

Electronic monitoring raises some questions about an individual’s right to privacy. But the Supreme Court has ruled that electronic tracking is within the scope of the Fourth Amendment — and many state courts have declared that protecting domestic violence victims’ lives requires the use of electronic surveillance.

Critics have voiced concerns about the cost of GPS devices and their technical glitches, which can make an offender wrongly appear to be in violation of the terms of their release. But the benefits of tracking repeat domestic batterers, given the staggering rates of intimate partner homicide, far outweigh the limitations.

“Domestic violence homicides are among the most predictable, and therefore the most preventable, of all homicides because there are patterns that can be identified,” said Toni Troop, the director of communications and development for Jane Doe Inc.

Laura Aceves’s life could have been saved if her batterer had been tracked. Ms. Aceves was shot in the head, in front of her 4-month-old baby, by her ex-boyfriend, Victor Acuna-Sanchez, in Arkansas. Mr. Acuna-Sanchez was out on bail for multiple domestic assault charges.

Long before Ms. Aceves was murdered, Mr. Acuna-Sanchez terrorized her and repeatedly broke the conditions of his pretrial release. Three weeks before he killed her, he was arrested for violating a no-contact order. He was released the following day. Mr. Acuna-Sanchez was ordered to check in regularly with his probation officer, but never did. Arkansas law enforcement never bothered to follow up.

To help determine potential lethality of domestic abuse, Jacquelyn Campbell, a domestic violence expert and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, created a 20-question risk-assessment tool, but it hasn’t been put into practice nationwide. The tool should be used in each state to improve judges’ ability to assess when electronic tracking is needed.