Commonwealth v. Wallace

Based principally on evidence obtained from two wiretaps, the defendant was found guilty on several drug charges after a jury-waived trial in the Superior Court. On appeal, the defendant claims that his pretrial motion to suppress the evidence derived from those wiretaps should have been allowed because the warrants for each wiretap were in sundry ways fatally defective.

1. The First Wiretap Warrant.

The first wiretap warrant was issued on December 21, 1979. Conceding that the tips from the two informants who implicated Wallace in drug trade were disregarded by the motion judge, 1 the defendant…