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Voters will not have an opportunity to impose an income surtax on the state’s wealthiest earners this November, after the Supreme Judicial Court issued a long-anticipated ruling Monday that the proposal known as the millionaire’s tax cannot appear on the ballot.
The proposal, which supporters dubbed the “Fair Share Amendment,” would have raised an estimated $2 billion via a 4 percent surtax on any income above $1 million. The amendment stipulated that money raised would be earmarked for education and transportation expenditures.
WBUR polling found consistent public support for the measure.
Attorney General Maura Healey ruled last year that the proposed amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution was legal, and qualified for the ballot, but opponents including business groups took Healey to court to challenge the constitutionality of the amendment.
Text Messages Can Be Used Against Their Senders in Criminal Cases, Massachusetts Court Rules
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on Tuesday that senders of text messages are not granted a right to privacy that could stop law enforcement from obtaining and using the messages against them as evidence in a criminal case.
The 5-0 precedent-setting decision (pdf) came in a case involving a Massachusetts man, Jorge Delgado-Rivera, who was indicted, alongside six others, on cocaine-trafficking charges.
An investigation that led to his indictment was sparked from evidence in the form of text messages that were obtained in 2016 by a Texas police officer during a traffic stop. The officer had searched a cellphone that belonged to Leonel Garcia-Castaneda. Delgado-Rivera had sent the messages to that phone, and the messages appeared to link him to an alleged drug trafficking ring.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday ruled that a person’s privacy rights do not prevent law enforcement from obtaining and using their text messages as evidence in a trial.
The justices unanimously ruled that a lower court erred in siding with a Massachusetts man who sought to block a search of his text messages. The man, Jorge Delgado-Rivera, was charged with six others in a drug trafficking case.
Justice Frank Gaziano wrote on behalf of the justices Tuesday that the defendant had “no reasonable expectation of privacy in the sent text messages because, as with some other forms of written communication, delivery created a memorialized record of the communication that was beyond the control of the sender.”