Commonwealth v. Norman, 142 N.E.3d 1

Defendant charged in July 2015; at arraignment the court ordered as conditions of pretrial release that he stay out of Boston and wear a GPS monitoring device.
Defendant signed a form stating GPS coordinates and location data "are recorded and may be shared" with court, probation, parole, attorneys, and law enforcement.
After an August 10, 2015 armed home invasion in Medford, police queried the probation electronic monitoring program (ELMO) without a warrant; ELMO produced stored GPS data placing the defendant at the scene and near an Everett address used as the basis for a search warrant.
Evidence recovered from the Everett search and a witness identification led to indictment on armed-robbery and related charges; defendant moved to suppress the GPS data and its fruits.
The motion judge granted suppression, finding consent was not voluntary and police needed probable cause; the Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the suppression on the separate ground that the initial imposition of GPS monitoring as a pretrial condition violated art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.

Issue	Plaintiff's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Whether imposition of GPS monitoring as a pretrial condition is a constitutional search	GPS monitoring is permissible as a bail condition to assure appearance and protect the public/witnesses under G. L. c. 276, § 58	GPS monitoring is a search that intrudes on pretrial privacy; pretrial detainees have greater privacy than probationers	Imposition is a search under art. 14; pretrial expectation of privacy is greater than a probationer’s, so heightened scrutiny applies
Whether the defendant voluntarily consented to GPS monitoring by signing the form	Signed form indicates consent to monitoring and sharing of GPS data	Signature was coerced by the alternative of pretrial detention; not free and voluntary	Signature did not establish free, voluntary consent; coercive context defeats waiver
Whether GPS monitoring here was justified by legitimate statutory interests to make a warrantless search reasonable	GPS monitoring furthers statutory goals (assuring court appearance; preventing misconduct) and can be tailored as a release condition	G. L. c. 276, § 58 authorizes conditions only to assure appearance and protect the integrity of proceedings; GPS here did not advance those aims	GPS monitoring imposed at arraignment did not further the statutory purposes (assuring appearance or protecting witnesses); intrusion outweighed any asserted interests => unconstitutional under art. 14; suppression affirmed.

Commonwealth v. Johnson, 481 Mass. 710 (2019) (GPS monitoring is a search; probationer’s diminished privacy affects balancing)
Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018) (individuals have reasonable privacy in whole of their physical movements)
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012) (attaching a tracking device implicates Fourth Amendment)
Grady v. North Carolina, 575 U.S. 306 (2015) (attaching device to person without consent for tracking is a search)
Commonwealth v. Feliz, 481 Mass. 689 (2019) (contractual signing of probation conditions does not establish voluntary consent to searches)
Commonwealth v. Augustine, 467 Mass. 230 (2014) (reasonable expectation of privacy framework and GPS/location data concerns)
Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) (search occurs when government intrudes on reasonable expectation of privacy)
Commonwealth v. Moore, 473 Mass. 481 (2016) (standard of review for suppression and balancing test for reasonableness)
Commonwealth v. Buckley, 478 Mass. 861 (2018) (Commonwealth bears burden to prove consent was free and voluntary)
Commonwealth v. LaFrance, 402 Mass. 789 (1988) (coercive context of avoiding incarceration makes waiver principles inapplicable)