For the first time, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday that the state constitution allows police to break into a suspect’s car to secretly install tracking devices using a global positioning system, provided that authorities have a warrant before they do so. In a unanimous ruling written by Justice Judith Cowin, the state’s highest court upheld the drug trafficking conviction of Everett H. Connolly, a Cape Cod man who was tracked by State Police in 2004 after they installed a GPS device in his minivan.
The court said that using GPS devices as an investigative tool, which can require police to secretly break into a vehicle to install the device, does not violate the ban on unreasonable search and seizure in the state’s Declaration of Rights.
“We hold that warrants for GPS monitoring of a vehicle may be issued,’’ Cowin wrote. “The Commonwealth must establish, before a magistrate . . . that GPS monitoring of the vehicle will produce evidence’’ that a crime has been committed or will be committed in the near future.
Innocent until proven guilty? Not anymore… the heats just been turned up a little higher.
#1 LtSiver
Everybody is guilty of something.
Just be careful if you are dating a police officer’s daughter or wife.
“must establish, before a magistrate . . . that GPS monitoring of the vehicle will produce evidence that a crime has been committed or will be committed ”
Excuse me????? They now violate your rights by predicting the future. Wasn’t there a movie about this crap in the future?
Doesn’t the same outcome get reached if the individual were to be be tailed continuously for the same amount of time.
Seems all a crook would have to do is have some device that “scans” for such devices, probably even something that could be small enough to be on a key chain.
i have only one question:
what the HELL is going on in Massachusetts?
-s
You’ve never had an expectation of privacy in your car. The Supremes decided that decades ago. This is nothing really new.
The can tap your phone and bug your house with a warrant. Why not your car?
The one that was a little more surprising is that I think they can just stick a tracking device on the bottom somewhere and follow you around without a warrant?
So is it a bad thing if I take off the tracking device and attach it to say, a Possum?