Product Description

Recent updates:

• Update: June 2020

  Dear Subscriber:

  Thank you for choosing to keep current in your criminal law practice and reference with this 2020 edition of the Massachusetts Arrest, Search, and Seizure Citator. Designed to provide criminal law practitioners with the resources necessary to succeed in this challenging area of the law, the citator contains Hon. Mark S. Coven's insightful commentaries on a host of cases decided over the past year, as well as a useful archive of important past decisions that are still good law in Massachusetts. As always, the book is divided into summaries of cases where warrants were obtained pursuant to arrest, search, or seizure, and cases involving searches, seizures, and arrests conducted in the absence of warrants. Here are just a few of the new cases summarized in this edition:

  CASES WITH WARRANTS

  • Controlled buy; police corroboration. Find a 2020 appeal where a two-prong test was applied relative to the use of police corroboration through a controlled buy.

  • Pretrial release; GPS device. A 2020 decision found the imposition of a GPS device as a condition of pretrial release to be a search under Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, and noted that the practice must serve a legitimate government interest.

  • Automatic license plate reader. See a 2020 decision finding the use of an automatic license plate reader utilizing cameras that read license plate numbers to constitute an unconstitutional search where the cumulative nature of the technological surveillance reveals a substantial picture of the defendant's public movements.

  CASES WITHOUT WARRANTS

  • Show of police authority. Find a 2019 case wherein the court looked at the totality of the circumstances to determine whether a law enforcement official engaged in a show of authority, either verbally or through conduct, that a reasonable person would consider coercive.

  • Police observations; exchange of object or money. See a 2019 case where no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity was found to have resulted from observations involving a person leaning into the window of an automobile, and thus, an exit order was found to be impermissible.

  • Strip search; manual body search. Find a 2020 decision where it was found that a strip search of a person in custody requires probable cause to believe that the defendant concealed contraband, drugs, weapons, or other evidence of a crime on the defendant's person or in a place where the police reasonably could not expect to discover it without exposing or examining an intimate part of the defendant's body. The case distinguishes manual body searches from strip searches.

  We at MCLE trust that you will find this material valuable in your prosecution or defense, and that you may find it to be an indispensable addition to your law library.

  Cordially,

  Maryanne G. Jensen, Esq., MCLE Director of Publications

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