by Anthony W. Accurso
Federal law enforcement agencies have been paying private companies for the information they collect on users—information for which agents would need a warrant to collect themselves.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), that the government must obtain a ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
An open-source initiative is empowering citizens to monitor automated license plate readers (“ALPRs”) worldwide, cataloging their locations to reveal how police and private companies deploy these surveillance tools.
Flock Safety (“Flock”), a leading ALPR vendor in the United States, markets its technology as a means to ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Metropolitan Police Department (“MPD”) in Washington, D.C., has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to monitor social media activity, targeting protesters and others not suspected of crimes, according to public records obtained through a 2022 lawsuit by the Brennan Center for Justice and Data for ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld a trial court’s order for a new trial after it concluded that defense counsel had a conflict of interest where counsel could potentially be called to testify about the events that occurred during a voluntary police interview that formed ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that a defendant being compelled to provide a thumbprint constitutes a testimonial act where it is used to establish ownership of a cellphone and its contents.
Background
Jeffrey Brown, Markus Maly, and Peter Schwartz were charged ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of Colorado held that a defendant who had her hands bagged and secured with zip ties to preserve any evidence of gunpowder residue without her consent at the police station and was confined to an interrogation room with the door closed was in ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held that the Government failed to satisfy its burden of proof that the emergency-aid exception to the warrant requirement applied to justify police officers’ warrantless entry into a home where the facts showed they had reason ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Axon, a company that makes products (including weapons) and services available to police departments, has begun selling a new product designed to use artificial intelligence (“AI”) to turn bodycam audio into police reports. However, a recent ACLU white paper expresses skepticism while cautioning against wider deployment. ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of Illinois invalidated an officer’s search of a vehicle and held that the odor of burnt cannabis, on its own, is insufficient to justify a warrantless search of a driver’s vehicle.
On September 15, 2020, Ryan Redmond was driving from Des Moines, Iowa, ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Desorption electrospray ionization, a type of mass spectrometry (“DESI-MS”), is being studied as a way to analyze overlapping or weak fingerprints, solving an age-old problem of evidence quality.
For over a century since Scotland Yard established its first Fingerprint Bureau, the issues of overlapping or weak ...
