NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
BY MARYANN SPOTO mspoto@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on Friday upheld the criminal convictions of three Orthodox Jewish rabbis who planned the kidnapping of a man to force him to grant his wife a religious divorce.
In upholding the convictions of Mendel Epstein, Jay Goldstein and Binyamin Stimler, the three-judge panel rejected claims of invasion of privacy and religious freedom among the other six points the three men made in their appeal.
Convicted in 2015 of conspiracy to commit kidnapping, Epstein, Goldstein and Stimler argued that their Fourth Amendment right to privacy was violated when FBI agents gathered information from their cell phone providers indicating their general locations during the investigations. During the trial, prosecutors used the information to show that they were in the vicinity of locations where beatings of husbands who refused to give their wives religious divorces occurred.
Defense attorneys argued the government should have sought a warrant for that information rather than obtain a court order, which requires less of a standard than a warrant to be issued.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.