In 2012, the Massachusetts legislature enacted the VALOR Act, which, among other things, amended the pretrial diversion procedures in the criminal courts so as to allow judges flexibility when dealing with military veterans.  Defense attorneys and prosecutors have been arguing over the correct interpretation and implementation of the statute ever since. The most common disagreement…

Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 268, section 13B criminalizes “witness intimidation.”  This exceptionally broad statute prohibits a panoply of conduct, and perhaps most often comes into play when an individual grabs a cellphone from another person who is alleged to have been trying to call the police.  I have represented many clients charged with “witness intimidation”…

Back in August of 2015, the Chief Justice of the District Court consolidated the cases of over 500 defendants charged with operating under the influence of alcohol who had filed motions to exclude the results of their breath tests.  The machine in question is the Draeger Alcotest 9510, which is the breath test machine used…

Effective December 15, 2016, the Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act (the “Act”) makes the non-medical recreational possession of marijuana legal for all adults, subject to certain limitations. The first thing to note is that the Act only applies to adults 21 and over.  Under age 21, the prior law decriminalizing marijuana up to an…

When a person is arraigned on criminal charges (arraignment means the first court appearance, at which the defendant is told about what the criminal charges are against them, and then asked if they want to represent themselves or rather want a lawyer to represent them), the matter of bail is always on the table.  If…

Because of the inherent negative collateral consequences of a having a criminal record, e.g., becoming unemployable, difficulty obtaining housing, many people seek to have their record sealed.  In Massachusetts, the sealing of a criminal record – or more accurately, the sealing of certain criminal charges on a criminal record – is governed by both statutory…

On June 14, 2016, in the case of Commonwealth v. Moreno, the Worcester Superior Court ordered evidence suppressed after applying the rule set forth in Commonwealth v. Gentile, and concluding that the police officers did not have a reasonable belief, at the time they entered the home, that the person they were looking for was…

Not a minute too soon, two cases have come down from the Appeals Court that restate what I had thought was a well-understood law school basic, namely that intent to defraud by false pretenses must be proven as of the time of the reliance-inducing promise complained of, not at some later point in time, and…

Recently, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court further fleshed-out the law with respect to probable cause to arrest for street-level drug transactions.  Typically, these cases involve the police observing someone passing an object to another person under suspicious circumstances, such as when one car pulls alongside another in a parking lot, and the occupants of the…

In Commonwealth v. White (2016), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a Superior Court judge’s allowance of a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence found within the defendant’s cellphone, finding that the warrantless seizure of the cellphone was unreasonable, and that the subsequent search of the cellphone was similarly unlawful. The case involved a high school…