NJ: Police break-in into apartment building common hallway violated REP

In 2010, police broke into the outer door of a two unit apartment building and looked in defendant’s open door. By then, the state courts had already held there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in the common hallway of such a building. To compound the state’s problems with this entry, the officer deliberately omitted that he broke in from his original police reports. During preparation for the hearing he admitted it, and he supplemented the report. The state attempts to get around this by arguing no reasonable expectation of privacy in the place searched, but that’s foreclosed by prior case law. The entry has to be suppressed and the trial court is reversed. State v. Sencion, 2018 N.J. Super. LEXIS 42 (Mar. 16, 2018).

Defendant was convicted in a state drug RICO case. There was a wiretap on a codefendant’s telephone, and defendant had no standing to challenge telephone calls on somebody else’s phone that he didn’t participate in. Bourassa v. State, 2018 Ga. App. LEXIS 199 (Mar. 15, 2018).*