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Your legal term of the day: Curtilage

A Watertown man today became the latest convicted drug dealer to have his verdict overturned because of a Supreme Court ruling that defense lawyers must be allowed to cross-examine experts who certify that what police found was a particular type of drug or weapon.

In the case of Carlos Fernandez, arrested in 2005, that was the easy part for the Supreme Judicial Court: The justices ruled that the certification that the white powder found by police in a bag in his car was cocaine was a critical part of proving his guilt and that therefore he deserves a new trial under Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, because his lawyer had no chance to question the person who signed the document.

The thornier part for the justices was deciding whether the cocaine should be allowed into evidence at all.

The search warrant obtained by Watertown Police was just for Fernandez's house. Prosecutors argued - and the trial judge agreed - that the car was fair game for a search because of the principle of "curtilege," which holds that sometimes, the definition of "house" can be expanded to include nearby structures that are intimately tied to or enclosed by it.

In this case, the state's highest court ruled, the car fell under the search warrant because it was parked in a driveway right next to the apartment that nobody else would likely use. This contrasted, the justice ruled, with an earlier case in which they dismissed evidence found in a car parked in a 50-space lot adjacent to an apartment building:

The present case differs in significant ways. Here, the defendant lived in the first-floor apartment of a "three-family home," not an "apartment complex." Directly adjacent to the house was a narrow driveway, approximately the width of one vehicle and the length of two, as compared to a lot that could accommodate fifty automobiles. There is no evidence that there was a side door or other way to gain access to the driveway from any of the other apartments. No one seeking to enter or visit the home would have had reason to traverse the driveway. Additionally, during the course of their surveillance, the police officers saw only vehicles associated with the defendant--his blue Honda, for one--parked in the driveway.

Therefore, the ruling concludes, curtilege covered the car.

Complete ruling.

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