In an important decision issued yesterday, the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction of a man for accosting a female student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as she walked back to campus after her Tae Kwon Do class. The name of the case is Commonwealth v. Joseph Sullivan. As the victim was returning...

When a criminal defendant elects to have a jury trial, there is an expectation that the jurors will be attentive during the trial.  But what happens when one of the jurors appears to sleep through the evidence?  The Appeals Court considered the issue this week in Commonwealth v. Luis Gonzalez. During the deliberations, the...

In an entertaining opinion delivered last week, the Massachusetts Appeals Court considered whether a man had been fairly convicted of a crime for wearing see-through shorts to a local Target store.  The Court concluded, in Commonwealth v. Coppinger, that the law was constitutional and that the prosecution had provided sufficient evidence to convict the defendant....

What happens when a sentencing judge makes a legal error that benefits the defendant, and the error goes unnoticed for almost one year?  In Commonwealth v. Selavka, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled last week that too much time had passed for the sentencing judge to fix the mistake, and the defendant was entitled to...

The Supreme Judicial Court issued an important decision this week regarding the requirement that certain sex offenders on probation be monitored by a GPS device.  The opinion was delivered in Commonwealth v. Guzman (SJC-11483 decided August 25, 2014). (more…)