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Court: Police made the case to see cell records of a Dorchester man charged with murdering his girlfriend

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that police and prosecutors proved they had a good reason to take a look at the location data for Shabazz Augustine's cell phone for the period in 2004 when his girlfriend went missing, then her car went up in flames, then her body was found floating in the Charles, wrapped in plastic bags, with weights chained to it.

Last year, in a ruling on Augustine's case, the court ruled a phone user's "cell site location information" was covered under the same privacy protections as other personal information, and that authorities needed to make a pretty damn good case the information could be connected to crimes.

In its decision today, the state's highest court ruled police and prosecutors had made that case, that the specific records they sought - rather than all of his phone data - could very well be used to prove Augustine's connection to Julaine Jules murder and the destruction of her car.

First, it is reasonable to conclude that Jules left her place of work in her vehicle on August 24, 2004, or at least that she intended to take her vehicle, because she took the keys to it with her. It also is reasonable to conclude, given the absence of any evidence suggesting otherwise, that Jules did not set fire to her own vehicle, and thus one can infer that whoever burned it probably obtained it from her, by force or with her permission. The defendant appears to have had the opportunity to do this. The defendant admitted to having asked Mitchell [his cousin] to lie to Jules and tell her that he was sick so that Jules would visit him at his home that evening. Although the defendant later denied seeing Jules that night, he first told Mitchell that he did see Jules, and he offered no explanation as to why he would have said that he saw her when in fact he did not. These facts provide a reasonable basis to believe that the defendant did see Jules the night of August 24, 2004, suggesting the possibility that he was the one who took her vehicle from her and set it on fire.

The defendant's presence somewhere north of Boston at 12:52 A.M. on August 25, approximately one-half hour after police found Jules's burning motor vehicle, lends support to this theory. Although it is unclear precisely where the defendant was when he called Smith (a fact we presume the Commonwealth hopes to discover through the defendant's CSLI) the defendant appears to have boarded a bus that was heading to the Sullivan Square MBTA station via Salem. Neither of these locations is particularly close to Revere, where Jules's vehicle was discovered, but all three locations are north of Boston, suggesting that the defendant could have driven Jules's vehicle to Revere, set it ablaze, and then taken public transportation back to his home in Dorchester. In addition, the defendant told Smith that he was out doing errands for his mother at this time, a fact that seems implausible given the early morning hour.

The court then went on to conclude that if authorities could make a good case to see the records related to the period in which the car went up in flames, their logic extended to the murder as well.

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Comments

Isn't it nice to see a public discussion of the scope and limits of the government's ability to gather information on its citizens? Take note NSA.

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Rob, that's your only take away from this article?! Wow, everyone wants to feel important by commenting on everything as long as they have an opportunity to affix their "cause du jour" to it.
In your case, you only saw this as an article on big government's reach into U.S. citizen's private lives. Really? I think your post would be more appropriate in a commentary section on Glenn Greenwald's website. Where's the empathy for Julaine, her family and her friends?

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