In a breakthrough ruling for police and prosecutors, the state’s highest court has ruled that the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights (embodied in the state Constitution,) permits police to secretly break into a suspect’s car for the purpose of covertly installing a GPS tracking device. Not only is the ruling a…
I often wonder how people in some professions can sometimes do what they do, unavoidably exposed to what they must see as part of their work, and not give up entirely on the human race, the human condition. Beyond my own profession as a Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer, I’m thinking…
It’s stories like today’s, which would make anyone outside of the profession of criminal law or law enforcement, pause to wonder what it is inside people that causes them to sometimes act the way they do. Not me. As a Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer, I’ve seen it all. Yet today’s…
This case is an interesting example of the importance of prosecutors – and defense counsel – taking care to watch what they say in their closing arguments to a jury, and of how a case can go awry in the last minutes of trying it. In Berkshire Superior Court last…
In another example of how professional sports players are anything but angels, or icons that should be praised, a former New England Patriots football player received a two year jail sentence earlier this week in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, for the statutory rape of a 15 year-old girl who…
I’m sure you read and hear of cases every day where judges hand down sentences to criminal defendants. Less frequently reported, are cases of a judge being threatened with some type of harm as the result of the sentences they mete out. Just such a case occurred recently in Suffolk…
In a painful lesson that alcohol is not the only drug that causes death when mixed with driving, a 25 year-old woman was killed this past Sunday when her car was hit in a head-on collision by a car driven by a drug-addicted driver. Alison Regan, 25, who was a…
In my previous post on this shocking story, I discussed the horrific details of how the stench of rotting flesh led a Worcester, Massachusetts landlord to discover the apparently murdered body of one of his tenants, 23 year-old Darlene Haynes. His discovery afterward that the once-pregnant victim’s abdomen had been…
As a Boston, Massachusetts criminal defense attorney, I’ve seen a lot of horrific crimes. Truly, shocking acts. But what was discovered in Worcester this past few days, would leave anyone stunned beyond words: Not only was a 23 year-old woman found murdered in her apartment, but the 8 month-old fetus…
Like seemingly everyone, I’ve watched this incident take over the media cycle for the past several days, and sweep across the globe (as in the world, not the Boston Globe,) who seem to be doing all they can to ring the racism bell, with frightening speed. I shook my head…