by Anthony W. Accurso
One police tactic that is quickly gaining traction involves surveilling social media posts on sites like Facebook and Twitter, but Facebook (now Meta) is reminding police that fake (or “dummy”) accounts are not allowed.
Police have always been allowed to view public posts by Facebook users, ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico’s denial of defendant’s 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion, ruling defendant’s appellate counsel was constitutionally ineffective under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), for failing ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts upheld the suppression of a defendant’s statements to police after invoking his right to an attorney, because the Commonwealth failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently waived his right to ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of North Dakota upheld the suppression of evidence obtained from a warrantless backpack search because neither the automobile nor the search incident to arrest exception applied, and the inevitable discovery doctrine didn’t apply.
On August 28, 2019, Nicholas Lelm was a passenger in ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Samuel Landes, a federal public defender representing Muhammed Momtaz Alazhari, filed a motion in federal court on August 30, 2021, alleging that the FBI used its small fleet of Cessna airplanes outfitted with spy equipment to continuously surveil Alazhari for 429 hours between April 18 and ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Court of Appeal of California, Fifth Appellate District, vacated a trial court’s decision to deny a defendant participation in mental health diversion, ruling that a diagnosis of Antisocial-Personality Disorder (“ASPD”)—an excluded condition under the statute—does not disqualify him because he was also diagnosed with at ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Since a New York Times articlein 2019 broke the news that Google’s Sensorvault database stores location information from hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, we have also learned that law enforcement have been increasingly reliant on this data to help solve crimes. Just how reliant they ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
A public-records request uncovered details about the New York Police Department’s use of a secret fund the agency has been using to purchase surveillance tech.
Two civil rights groups, the Legal Aid Society and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, obtained documents that were released by Wired ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of Georgia overruled the Court of Appeals’ line of cases starting with McBee v. State, 491 S.E.2d 97 (Ga. Ct. App. 1997), that apply a “relevance” standard to whether evidence seized outside the scope of a search warrant must be suppressed because ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
In a case of first impression on two issues, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (“SJC”) held that (1) an officer wearing a bodycam inside a suspect’s home during a domestic disturbance call was not a search under the Fourth Amendment and Article 14 and (2) ...
