Recently, attorney David W. White Jr., President of the Massachusetts Bar Association, published a piece in The Boston Globe, “Fixing Our Criminal Sentencing System“, on the subject of mandatory criminal sentencing. For those of you who may not know, “mandatory minimum sentencing” laws are the Massachusetts state legislature’s (and many…
In my last entry, I spoke about how the evidence in the 1996 John Salvi murder case was overflowing with expert testimony that Salvi was insane at the time of the abortion clinic murders that he committed. Despite this, many observers wished there existed a death penalty in Massachusetts. To…
In my previous entry on this case, I made the point that when a jury returns a verdict that a defendant is found to be “Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity”, that defendant is not released to the public, but is incarcerated in a state correctional facility for the criminally…
But faced with a crime this incomprehensible, all of us – singularly the jury selected for this case – must ask: What makes people act this way? What could drive a 17-year old boy to murder another student, in cold blood, – and this is the key – for no…
In my last entry that discussed the Lincoln, Massachusetts high school student accused of First Degree Murder in the killing of another student at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, I discussed John Odgren’s attorney’s reported plans to raise a defense of “Diminished Mental Capacity”. However, that’s a pretty general defense, and if…
Welcome to my first blog post on this site. It’s my hope that readers will find my thoughts, opinions, musings and postings to be educational, informative, and, sometimes hopefully, provocative toward a better criminal justice system in Massachusetts, and in other states. For this first entry, I’d like to comment…