OAKLAND — A defense lawyer formally accused Oakland police of illegally placing a tracking device on a man’s car and surveilling him without just cause, and prosecutors had responded with court filings justifying the move.
A judge was set to rule on the merits, but the court’s decision would never come. On the day of the hearing, prosecutors came to court and dismissed murder charges against an Oakland man, preventing the court from addressing the legality of the tracking device altogether.
The case was dismissed late last year, but has not been previously reported.
The case against 21-year-old Andre Stevenson Jr. had already made it past a preliminary hearing by the time prosecutors threw it out. Stevenson had been accused of murdering 25-year-old Raymond Adanandus during a drive-by shooting where dozens of shots were fired. A large part of the case rested on the tracking device, which Oakland police had reportedly placed on an involved vehicle weeks earlier, court records show.
The tracking device and its justification are shrouded in mystery. Police sworn statements on the matter were filed under seal, and now even Stevenson’s lawyer was allowed to see all the details. When the defense attorney, Miki Tal, raised the issue in court, a judge called a private, in-camera hearing, reviewed the warrant, and upheld it, records show.
But when Tal raised the issue a second time, prosecutors ultimately dismissed the case.
Adanandus was shot and killed May 27, 2024 while driving on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland; after being shot, he continued driving into San Leandro, where he crashed. When Oakland police began investigating, they realized that just three days earlier they had placed a tracking device on Stevenson’s Nissan, proving it was in the vicinity of the drive-by shooting, according to court filings.
Stevenson was arrested and charged, and a judge upheld the case at a preliminary hearing last year. But then Tal moved to toss the tracking device, after finally learning what police had used to justify placing it: They suspected Stevenson was involved in a robbery, which had occurred nearly six months earlier, in December 2023.
In a motion filed after the in-camera hearing, Tal argued that the “stale” justification violated Stevenson’s constitutional rights and that “no reasonable officer” would have used the robbery probe to place the device.
“The nearly six month hiatus between the alleged robbery and the search evidences a lack of probable cause to search absent additional factors, none of which have been articulated,” Tal wrote in a court filing. “The claim that any such evidence would be recovered is unsupported by any specific facts and entirely vague.”
In their response, prosecutors simply relied on the fact that the warrant justifying the tracking device was still under seal, speculating that while the robbery was months old, there could have been additional justifications that only police and the judge are privy to. They noted that police were actively surveilling Stevenson around the time of the homicide, indicating there was more to the investigation than simply one months-old robbery.
On Oct. 31, a judge was set to rule on the defense motion and DA’s response. Instead, prosecutors upended the hearing, announcing that the case against Stevenson was being tossed. He’d been jailed for the past three months, during which time his mother had died, according to court records.
The court log lists only one sentence to explain the dismissal. It was done “in the interest of justice.”