Commonwealth v. Guzman (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-149-14)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports. If you find a typographical error or other formal error, please notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Judicial Court, John Adams Courthouse, 1 Pemberton Square, Suite 2500, Boston, MA, 02108-1750; (617) 557-1030; SJCReporter@sjc.state.ma.us SJC-11483 COMMONWEALTH vs. JOSE A. GUZMAN. Suffolk. February 4, 2014. – August 25, 2014. Present: Ireland, C.J., Spina, Cordy, Botsford, Gants, Duffly, & Lenk, JJ.[1] Sex Offender. Global Positioning System Device. Constitutional Law, Sentence. Due Process of Law, Sentence. Practice, Criminal, Sentence, Probation. Civil action commenced in the Supreme Judicial Court for the county of Suffolk on February 7, 2013. The case was reported by Lenk, J. Thomas E. Bocian, Assistant Attorney General (Timothy J. Wyse, Assistant Attorney General, with him) for the Commonwealth. Ryan M. Schiff, Committee for Public Counsel Services, for the defendant. LENK, J. In the case before us, a Superior Court judge declined to include global positioning system (GPS) monitoring as a condition of the probationary portion of the sentence she imposed following the defendant’s pleas of guilty to several offenses. One of those offenses was the dissemination of visual material depicting a child in a state of nudity or sexual conduct, one of the “sex offense[s] involving a child” enumerated in G. L. c. 265, § 47, that requires a defendant convicted of such an offense to be subject to GPS monitoring as a condition of any term of probation, during “the length of his probation for any such offense.” We are called upon to decide whether the imposition of GPS monitoring in such circumstances is mandatory and, if so, whether such statutory mandate either constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure pursuant to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, or violates substantive and procedural due process pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and arts. 1, 10, 11, and 12 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. It is plain that G. L. c. 265, § 47, affords a sentencing judge no discretion whether to impose GPS monitoring on a defendant sentenced, as here, to a probationary term for an enumerated offense. Although, given the inadequate record before us, we do not reach the defendant’s Fourth Amendment claim, we conclude that G. L. c. 265, § 47, does not violate the defendant’s right to due process. Because the statute applied to the defendant in the circumstances, and because there was no constitutional bar to its application, the failure to include GPS monitoring as a condition of the defendant’s probation was error.[2] […]