News, Pleadings
David Nathanson
Public Trial Amicus Brief

On March 6, 2017, Attorney Wood and a team of attorneys from Ropes & Gray filed a brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Weaver v. Massachusetts, No. 16-240. They argue that the Court should not shy away from vindicating the treasured right to a public trial. The government's argument that vindicating the right to a public trial would "open up the floodgates" is both factually incorrect and diverts attention from the real issue: whether our Constitution entitles everyone to a public trial. Read the brief here.

Pretextual Stops

Amicus Brief: Pretextual Stops Enable Racist Policing

Attorney Wood on behalf of MACDL joined the powerful amicus coalition in Commonwealth v. Daveiga, including CPCS, the New England Innocence Project, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Racial Justice. The brief argues our consistent position that pretextual stops enable racist policing.

The amicus brief urges the SJC to extend the reasoning of Commonwealth v. Long and to adopt Chief Justice Budd's reasoning in her concurring opinion to ban all pretextual traffic stops. Traffic stops have become the modern equivalent of the general warrant, granting police officers arbitrary power to stop virtually any driver they want. The brief marshalls the overwhelming evidence that police use this arbitrary power disproportionately to stop and investigate people of color - most of whom are innocent of any crime.

This case has an undisputed fact pattern that exemplifies the problem. Gang unit cops were looking for a specific car but did not have probable cause to arrest anyone. The target car committed a minor traffic violation - being double parked. They saw Daveiga, who they considered as sort of "usual suspect", in the back seat. They ordered the car to move.

But later, they decided to stop the car explicitly on the "pretext" of the prior minor double parking infraction, which they had already decided to excuse! Really, they wanted to investigate the hunch that Mr. Daveiga, a Black Cape Verdean passenger, was up to no good. The arresting officer had stopped him thirty times in the past. They ordered him out, searched and found a gun in the car.

Amicus Brief Against Pretextual Stops

On behalf of MACDL, Attorney Wood co-authored an amicus brief challenging racist pretextual stops in Commonwealth v. Garner. Joining the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Racial Justice, the Committee for Public Counsel Services, and the New England Innocence Project, the brief argues that the routinely degrading practice of pretextual stops must be abolished. This case, dealing with a person who was repeatedly stopped by the same police officer for minor offenses, shows how pretextual stops and justifications for the inevitable searches that follow depend on racist assumptions of dangerousness, subjective police conclusions, and inferential leaps sold to courts as police “training and experience.” That kind of junk evidence in the service of an oppressive, racist practice must be banned from our courts.

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Racial Justice Litigation

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Every attorney at Wood & Nathanson is motivated to advance racial justice. It is a central focus of what we do. We thought we would take a moment to outline some of our work in this area. We have brought litigation challenging racism in traffic stops, stop and frisk, jury selection and the school to prison pipeline. Racism pervades the criminal justice system and we will not stop challenging it.

Landmark Ruling Against Racial Profiling

MACDL, whose amicus committee is co-chaired by Attorney Wood, released a statement on September 17, 2020 lauding the SJC’s decision in Commonwealth v. Long, adopting much of a MACDL argument, that was a major step forward for racial justice on the roadways of Massachusetts. The MACDL amicus committee formed a coalition with NEIP, LCR and CHHIRJ that filed an amicus brief urging the Court to prohibit racial profiling in traffic stops. amicus arguing that the Lora equal protection standard for demonstrating that automobile stops are motivated by race was unworkable and should be replaced with a "but for" test - essentially banning pretextual stops. The Court unanimously adopted the MACDL view that the Lora test is unworkable and replaced it with a more flexible totality of the circumstances test in which the question is whether the totality of the circumstances demonstrate that the officers' decision to stop the defendant was motivated by race. Moreover, two members of the Court (Lenk & Budd) agreed with MACDL that the better solution is to ban pretextual stops altogether. The attorneys at Wood & Nathanson have been focused on changing the law regarding racial profiling for years. In Long, Attorney Wood helped put together the MACDL team that drafted its powerful amicus brief. And prior to Long, Attorney Malm was counsel in Commonwealth v. Buckley, which appears to have convinced the SJC to take the problem of pretextual stops more seriously. [click to read full post]

Amicus Brief: Racist Pretextual Stops and Distracted Driving Law

Attorney Wood was proud to be part of a team arguing that the Supreme Judicial Court should abandon its cases allowing for pretextual stops and restricting how defendants can prove that a particular stop was racially discriminatory. The amicus brief goes on to point out that the Commonwealth’s new “Distracted Driving” hands-free law limits data collection on stops by individual officers, making it essentially impossible to ever prove a claim of discrimination. The Court should replace the current test with a test that asks whether a driver would have normally been stopped for the violation without a pretext. If not, then the prosecution has the burden to prove that the stop was not discriminatory. This amazing team was made up of Oren Nimni for the Lawyers for Committee for Civil Rights, Katharine Naples-Mitchell for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, Chauncey Wood for the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Radha Natarajan for the New England Innocence Project.