BOSTON, Jan. 3, 2018—The Massachusetts Appeals Court today reversed a lower court’s ruling that would have prevented jurors from hearing certain evidence about a hotel room key found on a human trafficking defendant at a downtown hotel where a suspected victim was found shaking, crying, and visibly afraid, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

In a 12-page decision by Justices Vickie Henry, Eric Neyman, and Peter Rubin, the Appeals Court found that Suffolk Superior Court Judge Kenneth Salinger erred by suppressing a statement by ADERITO BARBOSA (D.O.B. 3/28/84) in which he allegedly admitted that a room key found during his 2015 arrest at the Park Plaza Hotel fit the room to which police had been invited after responding to an advertisement on Backpage.com.

When Boston Police, State Police, and federal agents arrived at that room and identified themselves to the woman inside, the Appeals Court recounted from an evidentiary hearing, “she ‘became very agitated.’ She ‘was visibly crying and shaking.’ She told the officers, ‘You guys can’t be here. He’s coming.’” A detective at the scene “noticed that the woman had a telephone in her hand that was continuously ringing,” the court continued.

At about this time, Barbosa – “who was the target of the investigation” – arrived near this hotel room and investigators confronted him in the hallway. A brief struggle followed, during which Barbosa allegedly assaulted one of the officers, and he was taken into custody for that assault. After a pat frisk, investigators recovered a knife, about $500 in cash, several pre-paid credit cards, and a hotel room key from his person. Investigators asked which room the key was for, and Barbosa allegedly said it was “Room 540” – the one in which police encountered the woman. Following a hearing, Salinger denied Barbosa’s motion to suppress the key from evidence, finding that it would “properly and inevitably” have been found at booking.

“However,” the Appeals Court wrote, “the judge, sua sponte, suppressed the defendant’s statement that the room key found in his pocket was for room 540. The judge concluded that [a Boston Police detective] ‘was not entitled to inspect the hotel key … as a search incident to arrest’” and “improperly used the room key ‘for an investigatory purpose, i.e., asking [the defendant] what room it went to.’”

Suffolk prosecutors appealed that decision and the Appeals Court reversed it, citing the officers’ “ample evidence of the defendant’s involvement in the separate criminal activity of human trafficking before they arrested or frisked him. This evidence, at a minimum, rose to the level of reasonable suspicion and, thus, justified the inquiry regarding the room key …. The officers were ‘not required to blind themselves to [this] information.’ To the contrary, the totality of circumstances known to the officers demonstrated an obvious connection between the room key and the crime of human trafficking.”

Barbosa’s case returns to court on Jan. 29.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.