A real-estate broker already suffering PTSD from police violence during the "Arab Spring" in his native Egypt can continue his civil-rights suit against Stoneham over the way two police detectives detained him at gunpoint - and then kept him cuffed, on his knees, until his client arrived for his house tour and vouched that the man was a broker, not a burglar, a federal judge ruled last week. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today set out ways that police can subpoena tens of thousands of cell-phone records to try to link specific phone calls to crimes, in a case in which they used the technique to connect a Canton man to the murder of Jose Luis Phinn Williams at a Dorchester gas station and to a series of other similar, if less deadly, robberies that year in Mattapan, Canton and Cambridge. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that Suffolk County prosecutors can use as evidence a gun seized from a Roxbury man after a gang-unit officer watched him in a Snapchat video displaying the weapon. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a man's text messages can be used against him in a criminal case because they were recovered from another man's phone. Read more.
A federal appeals court in Boston ruled yesterday that defending homeland security trumps privacy and free-speech rights at the border, so federal agents don't need a warrant or even "reasonable suspicion" to seize your phone or laptop on your return from a foreign trip, turn it on and see what pops up. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld Keith Hobbs's first-degree murder sentence for the Dec. 16, 2010 death of Demetrius Blocker on Horadan Way. Read more.
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