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Court puts defendants wearing GPS devices on notice: Police are allowed to use the data to pin new crimes on them

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld a man's conviction for a West Roxbury housebreak based in part on data from the GPS device he was ordered to wear at his arraignment on charges he beat a woman in Dorchester.

Jamie Johnson's lawyers had argued that while Johnson agreed to wear the ankle bracelet so probation officers could ensure he was staying away from the woman's house, he never would have agreed to wear it if he knew it would track him everywhere and that police could access the data even if they suspected him of something unrelated to that case. It's all very much a violation of his Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure, he wrote.

In a ruling handed down today, the appellate court concluded: Please.

The court said that Johnson's arraignment agreement specified that Johnson not only stay away from the woman's house but from the woman herself - and that that meant probation officers and police could have full access to his whereabouts, as recorded by the GPS. The court noted he signed the agreement, so he knew he'd be monitored - as opposed to cell-phone users whose location data prosecutors love to try to gather.

This case presents a defendant, who the record fails to reflect is a person who possesses anything less than ordinary intelligence or who otherwise suffers from any intellectual deficits, who agreed to wear a GPS tracking device, and later claimed he did not understand that the tracking device was going to actually track him. It would indeed be a strange society, and one challenged by common sense, that would be "willing to recognize" the defendant's understanding "as reasonable."

In their ruling, the justices described the break-in: A woman living in a Cape in West Roxbury, "a quiet and friendly residential neighborhood," came home from vacation to find her home burglarized.

Police took a report, but had nothing much to go on - until a probation officer, looking into Johnson's tracking data at the request of a Norfolk County police department that was, shockingly, investigating Johnson, noticed the data put him at a West Roxbury address for 15 to 30 minutes around 4 a.m. on Aug. 29, 2013, found that suspicious and contacted Boston Police.

In his request to overturn his conviction, Johnson's lawyer also argued that the data from the state ankle-bracelet tracking system was "misleading and confusing."

Wrong again, the appeals court said. In fact, West Roxbury is one of the best places in all of Boston to track people with the system, the justices wrote:

Because the transmission of data is satellite-based, in general, the data points are accurate ninety percent of the time, within a thirty-foot radius of the transmitted point. Historically, the [state tracking] system has had no problems tracking GPS devices in West Roxbury, which tends to be a "[v]ery accurate" area, i.e., one of the better areas of "the city" to track GPS data. Data points are transmitted and received by the [tracking] system regardless of whether the device is inside or outside of a building.

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Comments

Answer: Very. This guys an idiot, but what's more concerning is there are actually people walking around who are stupid enough to not put 2 and 2 together and realize a monitoring device can monitor you. Or that cameras can see you. Or that crimes have consequences. Every day we hear about some stupid criminal doing something stupid that the average person just shakes their heads at. Is there some sort of developmental step these people are missing? Are drugs and alcohol or whatever that impairing?

Yes stupid people have committed stupid crimes for a long time, but there seems to be no progress even with us all knowing we live under (near) constant surveillance.

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Anger and rage impair a persons judgement.

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What does that do? Because apparently it doesn't do much of anything.

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Are you really shocked that criminals are scoring low on an IQ test? Really?

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Defense attorneys are ethically bound to zealously represent all clients, those whom they think will be justly found guilty as well as those whom they think are factually innocent. If that requires the attorney to dance on the head of a pin regarding the charge itself, or, as this case, portraying your client as dumb as a fence post, so be it.

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That the police would require you to wear a Global Positioning System anklet and actually track you?!?

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The court requires it. It isn't like the cops started tracking someone via their cellphone without a warrant. He also signed a form - likely reviewed by his lawyer - that indicated that he consented to being tracked as a condition of probation. This tracking has been subject to due process.

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Ok, the conditions of his probations required him to wear it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Did you miss the sarcasm?

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