A Dorchester man who followed his lawyer's advice to plead guilty to being a pimp will get a chance to prove his innocence at trial after the Supreme Judicial Court ruled today he couldn't possibly have gotten good representation from his lawyer - who professed repeatedly and publicly online to hating Blacks as much as he hated Muslims. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a Berkshire town and a Land Court judge erred in rejecting a religious group's attempt to build an RV camping area because people who would park there either have to attend religious activities there or work for the group - making it exempt from zoning restrictions under state law. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that Nickoyan Wallace has to stand trial on charges he shot a man to death on Park Street in Dorchester in 2021. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court concluded today that a judge erred in ordering Boston Police to hand over information about an informant in a gun case because even if his name were redacted, the information could provide enough clues for the defendant - or somebody else - to figure out who he is. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court is currently considering whether a Milford rape-counseling center has to turn over treatment records of a girl from Rhode Island to a court in that state that is hearing the case against her alleged rapist. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that Holyoke Solders' Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh and Soldiers' Home Medical Director David Clinton will have to stand trial for elder neglect for crowding infected patients together with vulnerable, non-infected patients in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, leading to an unusually high number of deaths. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court concluded today that the way the State Police office responsible for testing blood-alcohol devices withheld information on machines that failed calibration tests for years was such "egregious government misconduct" that anybody convicted of OUI based on breath tests on machines tested there should be allowed to appeal without struggling to prove their tests were invalid. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a Dedham police officers conviction for being an accessory before the fact to a kidnapping, saying it didn't buy his argument he thought his drug dealer was just going to use his badge, handcuffs and gun holster as part of a joke or some mild bondage with his girlfriend any more than the jury that convicted him did. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a Supreme Court decision last year that lets people pack guns for protection outside the home means it has no choice but to overturn a Boston man's conviction for the gun and bullets Boston and Watertown police found in his glove box - but the court upheld his 2 1/2 to 3-year sentence for one of the magazines they also found. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld the use of police body cameras to record voluntary statements of possible crime victims, in a case in which a man who was ordered back to jail on a probation violation in part because of those statements argued they violated the state ban on wiretapping - even though he was not involved in the recording. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged today that the state corrections commissioner made a very good case that Martin McCauley, 66, locked up for the way he murdered Carlos Madariaga in an alley off Gloucester Street in the Back Bay in 1981, isn't debilitated enough by serious mobility issues and constant, severe back and nerve pain to warrant medical parole. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a police officer who stopped David Privette not long after the robbery of a gas station one night in 2018 had enough probable cause to conclude he was a suspect even before he found him packing a gun and several hundred dollars in cash, and so prosecutors can bring him to trial. Read more.
The Massachusetts Constitution lets citizens verbally confront public officials, even to the point of calling them Hitlers, and officials can't just kill the microphones to shut up angry people up at public meetings, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled today, throwing out a Southborough town bylaw that required "civility" at Town Hall meetings. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today ordered a new trial for Omay Tavares, convicted of a 2010 murder on Rosseter Street in Dorchester, because his attorney, leading his first ever murder case after serving a two-year suspension for "gross incompetence" that got two other clients imprisoned, failed to act on a document from prosecutors that seemed to another man as the killer. Read more.
The state's highest court is considering the question of whether a hate-spewing lawyer ranting on Facebook can put aside his abhorrent beliefs when he walks into a courthouse and fairly represent somebody who is a member of groups he despises. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a man's first-degree murder conviction that stemmed from some banter-turned-fight over another man's Yankee's cap at closing time outside An Tua Nua on Beacon Street in 2004, so he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court concluded today that "electrons" stored at a Cambridge data center and used to assemble Web pages and feed apps for a California auto-parts retailer do not mean the retailer has a "physical presence" in Massachusetts. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today ordered a new trial for a Kingston couple who had been awarded $3.5 million because their house and yard kept getting pummeled by golf balls from a neighboring course, ruling the judge in the case had bogeyed his instructions to the jury. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that the state constitution does not allow a physician to help a terminally ill patient die, that, in fact, it could be considered a form of manslaughter. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a man facing OUI charges can't also be charged with defacing a police lockup with a "noxious or filthy substance" for having urinated all over the floor and through the bars of his cell, because the law used to charge him was aimed at pre-Civil War anti-temperance protesters and they didn't hurl bottles of urine through windows at the homes of people fighting demon rum. Read more.
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