TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - A ruling is due from New Jersey's highest court on a murder case in which the defendant claimed he was too fat to have committed the crime.
That defense didn't work for Edward Ates, and he was convicted in 2009 of killing his son-in-law four years earlier. But he appealed on the grounds that New Jersey's wiretapping law is unconstitutional.
An appeals court disagreed, but New Jersey's Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Ates challenged the ability of New Jersey authorities to secretly record a conversation between him and his sister in Louisiana.
Ates was back in Florida at the time. New Jersey law allows wiretapping phones in other states if the location where the calls were intercepted was in New Jersey.
