{"id":4015,"date":"2010-05-18T22:33:39","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T05:16:41","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T05:16:41","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=4015","title":{"rendered":"MA: “sooner [is] better” no exigency; seizure of bloody clothes from ER violated REP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seizure of defendant\u2019s clothing from a hospital ER was without exigent circumstances and violated his expectation of privacy. \u201cNor does the record reflect that obtaining a warrant before the police seized the clothes was impracticable. The detective’s generic testimony that \u2018sooner [is] better\u2019 is insufficient to establish the exigency.\u201d Commonwealth v. Williams<\/a>, 76 Mass. App. Ct. 489, 923 N.E.2d 556 (2010):<\/p>\n

In the circumstances presented here, the police presumptively violated the defendant’s rights under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution when they removed his clothing from the hospital over his objection. See United States v. Neely, 345 F.3d at 370. We agree with the motion judge that the defendant retained a possessory interest in the clothing, regardless of his status as a hospital patient. See, e.g., ibid. Cf. Commonwealth v. Porter P., 456 Mass. 254, 262-264 (2010), and cases cited (regarding authority of third parties to consent to police entry and search); id. at 265 n.11. The Commonwealth failed to demonstrate that the defendant forfeited his possessory rights. Hospital staff placed his clothing in plastic bags in accordance with hospital policy and for the sole purpose of safeguarding effects. Evidence of hospital personnel storing the clothing in a bag further illustrates that the hospital did not consider itself an owner of the clothes and that the clothes were held for the defendant. 8 Because the hospital did not jointly own the clothing, the defendant, particularly in light of his vigorous protest, had no expectation or reason to believe that his belongings would be turned over to police without his authorization. Thus, as the Commonwealth did not present adequate evidence of an exception to the warrant requirement, an exigency or otherwise, the seizure of the defendant’s clothing was unreasonable because he had not forfeited his possessory interest in the clothing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}