A Lynn man who successfully fought video evidence from a warrant-less camera pole mounted outside his home by police has been sentenced to 44 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to distributing opioids.
Nelson Mora, 31, is described by federal prosecutors as “a mid-level distributor of pharmaceutical grade and counterfeit oxycodone pills containing fentanyl” in a sentencing memorandum dated July 29.
But he deserves “A significant term of incarceration” because he “distributed drugs while he was waiting for trial and after he had already been caught once being involved in the same conduct,” prosecutors said.
Mora pleaded guilty in April 2024 to one count of conspiring to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV sentenced Mora on Monday, August 5 in U.S. District Court in Boston. Prosecutors had sought 46 months in prison, while the defense asked for 37 months.
Prosecutors say Mora distributed about 300 grams of fentanyl, which they note “is a synthetic opioid up to 50 times stronger than heroin” and “is a major contributor to fatal and nonfatal overdoses in the United States.”
Mora is one of 23 people charged in October 2022 in what the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts calls “a wide-ranging conspiracy to traffic counterfeit prescription pills.” Mora is the sixth defendant to be sentenced.
Mora was born in the Dominican Republic but grew up in Lynn and is a U.S. citizen, according to the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum. Prosecutors say Mora has been officially unemployed since 2018.
In December 2017, after police made 10 controlled purchases of illegal drugs from Mora, police set up a pole camera outside of his house in Lynn and filmed the front of the house, a sidewalk, and a nearby street 24 hours a day for 169 days in a row, collecting evidence of his drug-dealing activities and those of associates. That police activity was part of a state attorney general’s office drug investigation that was separate from the federal probe.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided the pole camera amounted to an illegal search. The high court ruled in August 2020 that the constant video surveillance may violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution but certainly violates Article 14 of the Declaration of Rights in the Massachusetts Constitution, which states, “Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures, of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions,” and requires a warrant issued by a judge based on evidence provided by an officer of the law in order to perform such searches and seizures.
In rejecting the pole camera evidence, the court reasoned in part that rich people can avoid such surveillance from the street by erecting physical barriers around their homes but poor people can’t, and if the court allowed such activity by police without a warrant it would “make those protections too dependent on the defendants’ resources.”
“We will not undermine these long-held egalitarian principles by making the protections of art. 14 contingent upon an individual’s ability to afford to install fortifications and a moat around his or her castle,” the court said in Commonwealth vs. Nelson Mora.
Relying on the state constitution instead of the federal constitution eliminated prosecutors’ ability to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, since state supreme courts are the ultimate interpreters of state constitutions.
Mora’s lawyer in a defense sentencing memorandum dated August 1 said that Mora’s parents separated not long after arriving in the United States and that Mora was largely raised by his mother, who struggled to support the family as a hairdresser and working at a textile company. Mora, his mother, and two siblings “lived in a ‘bad’ neighborhood with gangs and drugs” when he was growing up, the sentencing memorandum states.
One of his brothers is in Middlesex County House of Correction on state drug charges, according to court papers.
State drug charges against Mora are pending. Mora’s lawyer, Bradford Eliot Keene, who has a law office in Lynnfield, noted that “the Sword of Damocles” remains “closely suspended above his head, with the possibility of a lengthy term [in] state prison, absent a favorable outcome in the state case …”
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