Logan Clegg is once again appealing a Superior Court decision that denied his attempt to suppress evidence in his double-murder case.
The ruling allowed evidence obtained through a warrantless cellphone ping to be used against him during his 2023 trial, where Clegg was convicted in the murders of Concord couple Steve and Wendy Reid.
He has argued that the Concord Police Department unlawfully obtained his cellphone location data to track and arrest him without first securing a search warrant.
Clegg is appealing a June ruling by Judge John Kissinger at the Merrimack County Superior Court, who reaffirmed his earlier decision denying the motion to suppress.
Kissinger revisited the issue after the New Hampshire Supreme Court directed the lower court to reconsider whether the warrantless cellphone tracking violated Clegg’s constitutional rights.
In his 40-page ruling, Kissinger wrote that the Concord Police Department made extensive efforts to locate Clegg over several weeks before receiving a phone number linked to him.
“While police could have applied for a warrant prior to making the exigency request, officers were under the impression that a request to Verizon made with a warrant could take days or weeks to process before cell phone location data would be produced,” Kissinger wrote.
Although Kissinger acknowledged that officers were “mistaken” about how long the warrant process would actually take, he found that it was “reasonable” for them to rely on their prior experience in judging how quickly Verizon, Clegg’s carrier, would turn over the location data.
That warrantless request allowed detectives to locate Clegg at a grocery store in Burlington, Vermont.
Investigators then followed him to a nearby library, where they arrested him in October, 2022. The Reids were found shot to death in Concord months earlier, in April, 2022.
Among the questions Clegg’s attorneys are raising on appeal is whether Kissinger improperly concluded that police would inevitably have found Clegg through legal means, a conclusion they argue rests on assumptions about what officers knew and how they would have acted, rather than on the facts and procedures that actually existed at the time.
The appeal of Kissinger’s ruling will now go before the state Supreme Court, alongside Clegg’s separate, still-pending appeal of his murder conviction.
Clegg is currently serving a 100-year sentence for the Reid murders at the New Hampshire State Prison in Berlin.
