Commonwealth v. Anthony Govan, SJC-13600

The defendant, Anthony Govan, was charged in connection with a domestic violence incident and was subsequently placed on pretrial release with several conditions, including GPS monitoring and stay-away orders protecting the alleged victim and her daughter.
GPS monitoring was imposed even though the Commonwealth did not have the victim’s home address, making it impossible to set a geographic exclusion zone; the defendant was nonetheless required to avoid contact wherever the victim might be found.
Weeks later, police investigating an unrelated shooting incident requested and obtained from probation authorities two short time slices of the defendant’s GPS location data, showing his presence near the crime scene.
The defendant moved to suppress evidence obtained from the GPS data, contending its retrieval and review constituted unconstitutional searches.
The motion to suppress was denied, the defendant entered a conditional guilty plea, and the Supreme Judicial Court transferred the appeal.

Issue	Govan's Argument	Commonwealth's Argument	Held
Was the initial imposition of GPS monitoring as a condition of pretrial release an unreasonable search?	GPS monitoring is a highly intrusive search, not justified without an exclusion zone or proper consent.	It was justified by public safety interests and conditions like stay-away orders, outweighing any privacy intrusion.	Constitutional, because legitimate government interests outweighed the privacy intrusion.
Did the subsequent warrantless retrieval and review of short periods of GPS data constitute a search under art. 14?	Any review of historical GPS data is a search, requiring constitutional protection.	Short-term retrieval of location data, especially when defendant is on notice, does not implicate a reasonable privacy expectation; not a search.	Not a search; the defendant failed to establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in this context.

Commonwealth v. Norman, 484 Mass. 330 (imposition of GPS monitoring as a condition of pretrial release is a search under art. 14)
Commonwealth v. Feliz, 481 Mass. 689 (framework for evaluating reasonableness of warrantless GPS searches)
Commonwealth v. Johnson, 481 Mass. 710 (probationers have diminished expectations of privacy regarding GPS data)
Commonwealth v. Augustine, 467 Mass. 230 (expectation of privacy in long-term location-tracking)
Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 484 Mass. 493 (scope and limits on privacy expectations in electronic monitoring cases)
Commonwealth v. Perry, 489 Mass. 436 (short-term vs. long-term location tracking and privacy)