Commonwealth v. Anthony Govan

Summary

The court held that imposing GPS monitoring as a condition of the defendant's pretrial release was a search under art. 14, but was reasonable because the governmental interests in protecting alleged victims and witnesses outweighed the defendant's diminished privacy interest. The court further held that the warrantless retrieval and review of twenty minutes to one hour of the defendant's historical GPS data for a particular shooting was not a search because it did not invade an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical movements. The court therefore affirmed the denial of the motion to suppress.