MACDL, whose amicus committee is co-chaired by Attorney Wood, released the following statement on September 17, 2020:
“Today the SJC issued a 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. MACDL's amicus brief argued that the court's existing legal framework for demonstrating that automobile stops are improperly motivated by race (a complicated and expensive statistical analysis mandated in Commonwealth v. Lora that had never been met) was unworkable and should be replaced with a simpler "would have" test; that is, whether the totality of the circumstances demonstrate that an objective police officer would have made the stop notwithstanding the arresting officer's stated motivation for the stop (i.e. whether the stated justification for the stop was a pretext for further investigation). Stated more simply, MACDL's coalition urged the Court to ban the pernicious law enforcement practice of pretextual traffic stops, including racial profiling.
The Court unanimously adopted the MACDL coalition's argument that the Lora test is unworkable and replaced it with a more flexible totality of the circumstances test in which the question will be whether the totality of the circumstances demonstrate that the officers' decision to stop the defendant was motivated by race. The Court abandoned the Lora requirement of a statistical analysis proving a pattern of racially motivated stops by the arresting officer. Moreover, two members of the Court (Lenk & Budd) would have gone further; they agreed with MACDL's coalition that the better solution is to ban pretextual stops, and with it racial profiling, altogether.
The late Chief Justice Gants summarized the justices' various views nicely: "In closing, I note that, despite our jurisprudential differences reflected in the various opinions in this case, the court is unanimous in concluding that a motor vehicle stop that arises from racial profiling is unconstitutional, that the burden placed on defendants in criminal cases to establish an inference of racial profiling need not be based on statistical evidence, that the burden may be met by inferences arising from the totality of the evidence of the stop, and that the burden should not be so high that a remedy is, in practice, mostly illusory. In short, it is the unanimous view of this court that the prohibition against racial profiling must be given teeth and that judges should suppress evidence where a motor vehicle stop is motivated, even in part, by the race of the driver or passenger."
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.