I grew up in Wilbraham. So this Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) opinion caught my eye today.
According to court documents, in 2017 a Wilbraham police officer stopped Manual Diaz on Springfield Street around 9:30 p.m.
The officer would later testify that he observed Diaz speeding before initiating the stop.
Diaz pulled over and then allegedly sped away from the officer, driving off the road within less than a minute.
Diaz then reportedly ran from his car into nearby woods.
Police claim that they found a bag of cocaine along Diaz’s escape route.
Ultimately law enforcement charged Diaz with trafficking cocaine.
His lawyers filed a motion to suppress the alleged narcotics, arguing that the traffic stop was not justified.
After an evidentiary hearing,
The motion judge noted a number of inconsistencies between [the Wilbraham police officer’s] testimony and the [cruiser] video, audio, and global positioning system (GPS) evidence…Because of these inconsistencies as well as [the officer’s] general confusion and lack of memory, the motion judge concluded that he could not credit [the officer’s] explanation and justification for the stop of the sedan. (Citations and quotations omitted.)
Nevertheless, the judge found that
the defendant’s flight from that stop was abrupt and reckless under almost any standard and therefore was a sufficiently independent intervening act to trigger the attenuation exception to the exclusionary rule. (Citations and quotations omitted.)
Consequently, the judge denied the motion to suppress.
Diaz’s lawyers appealed to the SJC and the justices concluded that the evidence should have been suppressed.
The most noteworthy aspect of the opinion involves the exclusionary rule’s “attenuation exception” and its application to equal protection violations.
(Large parts of the 21-page opinion are as clear as mud. So bare with me as I try to explain this in laymen’s terms.)
The exclusionary rule says that courts must suppress evidence seized through unlawful searches or stops.
Such searches/stops typically involve a violation of the defendant’s right against unlawful searches and seizures.
See Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights and the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
However, if there are attenuating circumstances between the unlawful search/stop and the seizure of evidence, the exclusionary rule may not apply.
This “attenuation exception” has three factors:
(1) the temporal proximity of the [unlawful conduct] to the defendant’s response; (2) the presence or absence of intervening circumstances; and (3) the purpose and flagrancy of the misconduct.
This is known as the Borges test.
The present SJC case is important because it emphasizes that the same test applies to equal protection violations (e.g., stops and searches based on race) and that any racial profiling by police amounts to “flagrant” misconduct.
Because of the recognized gravity of racially selective traffic enforcement, and the fact that no “amount” of racial motivation in traffic enforcement is compatible with equal protection, racially selective traffic enforcement violative of equal protection is inherently flagrant under the Borges test.
The full text of the opinion is attached below.