Boston Police, without a warrant, used data from a defendant’s GPS monitor to allegedly link him to a shooting.
The defendant was wearing the GPS monitor as part of his pretrial release conditions for an unrelated case.
The defendant’s lawyer challenged the data use, claiming it violated his protection against warrantless searches per Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
Today the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) issued an opinion which concluded that use of the data did not amount to a “search.”
The SJC began by stating the question at issue:
where the initial imposition of GPS monitoring as a condition of pretrial release is a constitutional search under art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, is the subsequent warrantless retrieval and review of twenty minutes to one hour of GPS location data indicating proximity to a crime scene for the purpose of conducting a criminal investigation also a search under art. 14?
The court concluded that the data use did not amount to an Article 14 “search.”
In sum, we conclude that the defendant has failed to establish that either of [the police] inquiries intruded upon an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy. First, the defendant was aware that his physical movements were subject to GPS monitoring to ensure compliance with the conditions of his pretrial release, and he was also on notice that pretrial release could be revoked if he engaged in criminal activity while on supervised release. Second, neither the twenty-minute inquiry into whether the defendant was near the scene of the crime nor the one-hour inquiry into the defendant’s precise movements revealed a quantity or quality of information that intruded upon an objective expectation of privacy in the whole of one’s physical movements. We conclude that regardless of whether the defendant had a subjective expectation of privacy in the relevant location data, “society [would not be] willing to recognize that expectation as reasonable” (citation omitted). Augustine, 467 Mass. at 242. It follows that the retrieval and review of the defendant’s location data vis-Ã -vis the August 1 shooting incident was not a search under art. 14.
The full text of the opinion is attached below.