Leave it to the federal government to complicate everyday life beyond reason, to make the simple difficult, to make that which should be easy, hard. How? Because an arguably obscure federal law has now caused Massachusetts state officials to encourage local police chiefs to revoke the Licenses To Carry a…
“Deja Vu, all over again.” I don’t mean for that quote from the late Yogi Berra to be humorous here. I’m talking about yet another mass shooting, this time in Oregon. Ten people killed, seven wounded. For me, as Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer, one of the scariest things about this…
I get an increasing number of calls and emails from people who either want to secure a gun license for the first time (“License To Carry”, or “LTC” in abbreviated legal terms,) or they have been denied a license application by a local police chief, and wish to appeal. Most…
A lot of back-and-forth has been going on up on Beacon Hill lately over gun reform legislation here in Massachusetts. As usual, the warring parties are gun owners and the gun lobby, vs. gun control advocates. Generally speaking, those two camps are represented by the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association,…
Something made the local (and some national) news earlier this week, that has to stand out as one of the most shocking, ridiculous overreactions from school officials I have ever seen. This past Wednesday, March 22, a 5-year-old boy at the Central School kindergarten in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, was standing in…
In my previous post on this subject, I wrote of how politicians everywhere from the White House on down will now react to this latest shooting tragedy with a predictable, unanimous response: More debate on gun control, with the equally ever-predictable partisan response: Democrats calling for more strict gun control;…
People everywhere are shocked at the Aurora, Colorado theatre shooting massacre that took place yesterday. 21 people killed 59 wounded. On a pedestrian level, that’s obviously very understandable. It frightens one to the core. Yet, should we really be so surprised that this type of violence has again streaked the…
Most people who were asked what “Double Jeopardy” is, would think it has something to do with the TV game show. Not exactly. OK – to be fair, you’d probably need to have taken at least one college-level course in criminal justice or pre-law, to understand the answer. What the…
Last Friday, a Hampden County Superior Court jury returned a verdict that a lot of people on either side of the gun control debate had been watching closely. Called informally the “Uzi Death Case,” the former Chief of the Pelham, Massachusetts Police Department, Edward Fleury, was charged with involuntary manslaughter…
In my previous post on this subject, I discussed the recent Supreme Judicial Court ruling that persons found to be in illegal possession of a firearm in Massachusetts can no longer be held in jail prior to trial, based on the grounds that such persons present a danger to the…