Getting good news out of Massachusetts is rare but certainly welcome. For a while Massachusetts has been enforcing its law against filming police in public much to the dismay of everybody but the police. Thankfully the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston have ruled that Massachusetts’s law is unconstitutional:
A Boston lawyer suing the city and police officers who arrested him for using his cell phone to record a drug arrest on the Common won a victory today when a federal appeals court said the officers could not claim “qualified immunity” because they were performing their job when they arrested him under a state law that bars audio recordings without the consent of both parties.
In its ruling, which lets Simon Glik continue his lawsuit, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said the way Glik was arrested and his phone seized under a state wiretapping law violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights:
The entire ruling can be read here [PDF]. It would be nice to get the Supreme Court to take up one of these cases and rule the prohibition against recording police unconstitutional so we would no longer have to deal with these egregious laws.
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