Commonwealth v. Fredericq, 121 N.E.3d 166

Police obtained a 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) order in 2008 to collect prospective CSLI (pinging every 15 minutes) for a phone associated with Cassio Vertil; the phone traveled to Florida and back with the defendant as a passenger.
CSLI led police to surveil and stop the brown Toyota RAV-4; surveillance and CSLI then prompted officers to go to the defendant’s multiunit residence.
Officers confronted the defendant at his third‑floor room, informed him (based on CSLI-derived information) that he had just been to Florida and may be storing narcotics, advised Miranda rights, and obtained his written consent to search.
Search yielded $2,200 in cash and two bricks of cocaine in an attic crawl space. The defendant moved to suppress as fruits of an unlawful CSLI search.
The trial judge granted suppression (finding the CSLI tracking unlawful under Massachusetts law absent a warrant and that the consent was tainted); Appeals Court agreed on standing/attenuation but reversed as to the crawl space on expectation-of-privacy grounds; Supreme Judicial Court affirmed suppression.

Issue	Commonwealth's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Standing to challenge CSLI tracking	No standing because phone was used by Cassio, not defendant	Defendant was passenger whose movements were effectively tracked via phone	Defendant has standing: CSLI tracking of the phone effectively tracked the vehicle and defendant's movements (Rousseau analogy)
Admissibility of contraband found in crawl space	No suppression needed because defendant lacked expectation of privacy in crawl space	Cocaine is fruit of illegal CSLI search and must be suppressed	Suppress: exclusionary rule applies to fruits of illegality even if contraband found where defendant lacked privacy; Commonwealth must prove attenuation
Whether defendant's consent attenuated taint	Consent purged the taint; independent facts supported the search	Consent was obtained immediately after confrontation with CSLI-derived information and thus tainted	No attenuation: consent was temporally and causally linked to CSLI-derived confrontation and therefore exploited the illegality
Effect of police good faith reliance on §2703(d)/SCA	CSLI was lawfully obtained under §2703(d) in 2008; exclusion unwarranted	Even if police relied on §2703(d), subsequent law (Augustine/Carpenter) makes CSLI a search; suppression required	Court declines to adopt a good‑faith exception here (issue waived); police reliance on §2703(d) does not avoid exclusion under current art. 14 analysis

Commonwealth v. Estabrook, 472 Mass. 852 (Mass. 2015) (CSLI tracking requires warrant after six hours under art. 14; statements obtained close to CSLI interrogation may be suppressed)
Commonwealth v. Augustine, 467 Mass. 230 (Mass. 2014) (prospective CSLI closely analogous to GPS tracking; warrants required)
Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (U.S. 1963) (fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine: evidence obtained by exploitation of illegality must be suppressed)
Commonwealth v. Damiano, 444 Mass. 444 (Mass. 2005) (Commonwealth bears burden to prove attenuation; consent may attenuate if untainted)
Commonwealth v. Rousseau, 465 Mass. 372 (Mass. 2013) (passenger has standing to challenge extended GPS surveillance of vehicle)
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (U.S. 2012) (extended GPS monitoring implicates reasonable expectation of privacy)
Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (U.S. 1975) (Miranda warnings or consent do not automatically purge taint of an unconstitutional arrest/search)
Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (U.S. 2018) (government acquisition of CSLI constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment)