The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday ruled that a person’s privacy rights do not prevent law enforcement from obtaining and using their text messages as evidence in a trial.
The justices unanimously ruled that a lower court erred in siding with a Massachusetts man who sought to block a search of his text messages. The man, Jorge Delgado-Rivera, was charged with six others in a drug trafficking case.
Justice Frank Gaziano wrote on behalf of the justices Tuesday that the defendant had “no reasonable expectation of privacy in the sent text messages because, as with some other forms of written communication, delivery created a memorialized record of the communication that was beyond the control of the sender.”
The state’s highest court unanimously extended the existing legal principle that a letter writer loses privacy rights by dropping it in the mail just like someone hitting send on their phone.
Nate Raymond
REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
A lawyer for Robinhood Financial LLC on Wednesday warned a Massachusetts judge that allowing state regulators to enforce a new fiduciary rule against the company could disrupt modern retail trading and drive low-cost brokerages out of the state all together.
Timothy Burke, a lawyer for Robinhood at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, made those remarks as he urged a state court judge in Boston to block Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin from moving forward with his extraordinary enforcement case.
Menlo Park, California-based Robinhood sued in April after Galvin moved to revoke the popular online brokerage s license to operate in the case after charging that it encourages inexperienced investors to place risky trades without limits.
In Cobble Hill Center LLC v. Somerville Redevelopment Authority (pdf), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) upheld the eminent domain taking by the Somerville Redevelopment.
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