Commonwealth v. Augustine
- Court
- Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (State high court)
- Decided
- 2014
- Citation
- 467 Mass. 230 (2014)
- Standard applied
- Article 14, Massachusetts Declaration of Rights — historical CSLI
What the court held
Although historical cell-site location information is a business record of the subscriber's carrier, the subscriber has a reasonable expectation of privacy in it, and obtaining two weeks of it was a search requiring a warrant on probable cause under article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. A valid order under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) was not sufficient. The case was remanded to allow the Commonwealth to try to show that its § 2703(d) affidavit in fact established probable cause.
Why
The court rejected the argument that no state action occurred because the carrier had generated and held the data on its own, and rejected the contention that the subscriber voluntarily revealed his location by using the phone. Because cell-site records place a phone — and so its user — within a relatively small geographic area over an extended period, the court held the state constitution's warrant requirement applied to the two-week collection at issue.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Augustine reached the Carpenter result four years earlier under a state constitution, which is the single most important structural lesson in this area: state charters frequently protect digital data that federal doctrine does not yet reach. A practitioner assessing how location evidence was obtained has to check the state constitutional rule as well as the Fourth Amendment, and in some states the answer differs. The remand also shows the practical escape route — a §2703(d) affidavit that happens to establish probable cause may survive.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: CSLI · state constitution · article 14 · warrant
Cited 90times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
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