In Grady v. North Carolina, the United States Supreme Court unanimously decided that the government conducts a “search” implicating the protection of the Fourth Amendment when it monitors someone’s movements electronically without their consent. This ruling may have some implications for the government’s use of electronic surveillance techniques, but ultimately…
Eight years ago, Peggy Young lost her medical coverage after she was forced to take an extended leave of absence from her job at UPS, because UPS would not accommodate her pregnancy-related weight-lifting restriction (her doctor limited her to lifting no more than 10-20 pounds during pregnancy). Although UPS accommodated…
This is the second in a series of posts exploring the consequences for criminal defendants of an Act Relative to Domestic Violence, which the legislature passed and Governor Deval Patrick signed late last summer. That law created the new crime of strangulation or suffocation, which carries significantly greater penalties than…
In August 2014, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed into law An Act Relative to Domestic Violence. This law ushered in many changes in Massachusetts criminal law and procedure, which will be a topic of several blog posts here at bostonlawyerblog.com. In today’s post I will be addressing one of…
At this year’s Academy Awards, Patricia Arquette used the platform she gained as a Best Supporting Actress winner to speak about pay inequality, saying, “It is our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” Persistent gender discrimination…
The Supreme Judicial Court today, February 27, suppressed a search that was triggered by police observing “about an ounce” of marijuana in a car they had stopped for a broken headlight (Commonwealth v. Sheridan, No. SJC-11543). Following the decriminalization of marijuana possession in small amounts (under an ounce) by the…
Angela Ames resigned from her position at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company just three hours after she returned from maternity leave. Upon her return, she sought access to the company’s lactation rooms and was informed that she would have to wait three days for permission to use a room. She was…
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) has issued extensive revisions to the rule governing criminal pleas, which will take effect on May 11, 2015. As I explain below, while the changes address a narrow issue, they impact criminal defendants because they further constrain what little judicial discretion is left in…
The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable” searches and seizures, but what the courts consider “unreasonable” has evolved and shifted over time. One overarching trend over the last few decades is that police officers have been given significant leeway, and usually the benefit of the doubt, to stop and search individuals…
On January 12, 2015 the Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) issued an opinion in Commonwealth v. Gomes holding that from now on juries must be instructed on scientific principles regarding eyewitness identification, and drafted a provisional jury instruction for judges to give until an official model instruction is developed. The decision…