Nothing wrong with police using body cameras while interviewing crime victims who agree to talk in a probation case, court rules

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld the use of police body cameras to record voluntary statements of possible crime victims, in a case in which a man who was ordered back to jail on a probation violation in part because of those statements argued they violated the state ban on wiretapping - even though he was not involved in the recording.

The ruling in the case of Charee Rainey technically means he now has to spend two years locked up in a Suffolk County jail for violating his parole on a conviction for beating up a former girlfriend in 2013 by attacking his new girlfriend in 2019. However, Rainey is already behind bars as he awaits trial on charges he and an accomplice fatally stabbed a man in Falmouth over drugs and money last September.

In the camera case, the state's highest court said that to start, probation hearings have lower bars of evidence than criminal charges, but that, in any case, the state wiretapping law, enacted in the 1960s, was meant to combat illegal "eavesdropping" and that a police officer recording a victim who had agreed to help police in their investigation was not eavesdropping on anybody, let alone Rainey, who was not in the apartment at the time.

Police say he and his then girlfriend got into an argument in her Boston apartment, she ordered him out, pushed a couch against the front door to make sure he stayed out, then he returned, managed to overcome the couch and attacked her, according to the court's summary of the case.

In the ensuing struggle, he pushed the victim's neck and chest, scratching her chest. The victim yelled for her older daughter to call the police and to go to the upstairs neighbor; in response, the defendant covered the victim's mouth and then slapped the telephone from the daughter's hand.

The defendant pushed the victim to the ground and used his legs to push her away. He then took some personal belongings and fled the apartment in the rental vehicle, also taking with him the apartment keys.

One of the police officers who responded and interviewed the victim at first took notes with a pen on paper, then announced he was turning on his body-worn camera, to which neither the victim nor her daughter objected, the summary continues.

In reviewing the history of the state wiretapping law, the court concluded:

The Legislature's focus was the use of devices, like bugs, for clandestine or surreptitious eavesdropping; the Legislature did not appear to have in mind law enforcement officers' use of devices to record a crime victim's voluntary reporting of a crime under circumstances where, as here, the victim understood her statement was being preserved by them. In sum, the legislative history (like the statutory framework, including the preamble) is devoid of anything to support the defendant's proposed construction, and accordingly, we reject it.