State v. Shirley Reid

4-21-08 State v. Shirley Reid (A-105-06)

Pursuant to Article I, Paragraph 7, of the New Jersey
Constitution, the Court holds that citizens have a reasonable
expectation of privacy in the subscriber information they
provide to Internet service providers. Accordingly, the motion
to suppress by defendant Reid was properly granted because the
police used a deficient municipal subpoena. Law enforcement
officials can obtain subscriber information by serving a grand
jury subpoena on an Internet service provider without notice to
the subscriber. The State may seek to reacquire the information
with a proper grand jury subpoena because records of the
information existed independently of the faulty process used by
the police, and the conduct of the police did not affect the
information.

Posted by Ken Vercammen