Warrantless Review of Electronic Monitoring Data: Cases Outside North Carolina

In February, I blogged about State v. Thomas, 295 N.C. App. 564 (2024), and whether law enforcement can review ankle-monitoring data without a warrant. The defendant in Thomas was on post-release supervision when officers pulled his location data, and the Court of Appeals upheld the warrantless retrieval of the data. However, questions remain about whether a warrant is necessary when a supervisee is on probation or pretrial release. Although North Carolina appellate courts have not directly addressed these questions, courts outside the state have in recent years. This post examines some of the cases. Massachusetts In Commonwealth v. Johnson, 481 Mass. 710 (2019), the defendant challenged law enforcement’s warrantless review of his ankle monitor location data while he was on probation. One wrinkle was that the defendant was no longer on probation when officers pulled the data. The Massachusetts appellate court concluded that the warrantless search was constitutional. Notably, in contrast to North Carolina, Massachusetts has a statute explicitly authorizing law enforcement to review probation records, including location data gathered by the probation department. However, one judge in Johnson issued a strongly worded dissent. The judge acknowledged that the defendant showed “chutzpah on stilts” when he chose to commit a new property crime while wearing the ankle monitor imposed after being convicted of another property crime. Id. at 731. However, the judge found that the retrieval and analysis of defendant’s location data, based only on a “hunch,” Id. at 721, ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment. The dissenting judge was especially [...]