A judge has denied Logan Clegg’s attempt to suppress evidence in his double-murder trial, reaffirming a previous decision after being tasked by the New Hampshire Supreme Court to reexamine it.
Clegg, convicted in the 2022 murders of Concord couple Steve and Wendy Reid, sought to exclude evidence that police collected after he was tracked down without a search warrant.
The court evaluated Clegg’s argument over the course of a three-day hearing preceding his trial, but denied it on the basis of “exigent circumstances” that prompted police to act swiftly as they tracked Clegg down in Vermont six months after the Concord murders by using cell phone location data.
Once he was arrested, police found a handgun that matched the one used to shoot the Reids.
Following an appeal by Clegg’s attorneys, the state Supreme Court in March remanded the case back to the lower trial court to reconsider whether the warrantless search was enough of a constitutional violation to throw out the evidence that was ultimately used to convict him.
“The court finds that CPD would have inevitably discovered the evidence that was inside of Mr. Clegg’s backpack at the time of his arrest as well as the evidence found at his Burlington campsite,” presiding judge John C. Kissinger, Jr., wrote in an order released Friday, June 12.
The doctrine permits that any evidence seized during an illegal search may still be admissible in court if the search was justified, if police acted in good faith and if the evidence would have inevitably surfaced during a future legal search.
The state met that legal standard, the court’s reexamination determined. In addition, the court weighed the severity of the police department’s actions against Clegg’s constitutional rights.
“Given the limited nature of CPD’s intrusion and the absence of bad faith, the court
concludes that the weight of society’s interest in deterring CPD’s unlawful police
conduct is relatively low,” the court order states. “By contrast, the weight of the public interest in having the jury receive all of the probative evidence implicated by Mr. Clegg’s motion to suppress is comparatively high.”
At hearings earlier this year, witnesses for the state underscored the urgency felt by local authorities to apprehend Clegg, after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security alerted them that Clegg had purchased a one-way flight to Germany.
The notice from DHS arrived on October 11, 2022; Clegg’s flight was scheduled to depart from New York at 12:30 a.m. three days later. Believing they had little time to act, Concord Police decided to “ping” the phone number associated with the flight reservation through Clegg’s carrier, Verizon.
Although investigators could have secured a time-sensitive warrant compelling Verizon to cooperate, the company’s manual instructs its team to respond to warrants within 14 days.
Instead, the warrantless requests submitted by the Concord Police Department led detectives to track Clegg down to a grocery store in Burlington, Vermont, and trail him to a library, where they arrested him.
Clegg is currently serving two consecutive 50-year-to-life sentences at the New Hampshire State Prison in Berlin. A jury found him guilty on nine charges related to the Reid murders: four charges of second-degree murder, four of falsifying evidence and one of firearm possession as a convicted felon.
