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It is too bad that there are no awards shows for the criminal justice system. A couple of years ago, The Boston Criminal Lawyer Blog began presenting virtual memberships to the “Hey, I Bet I Can Make This Situation Worse!” club. Maybe we should revisit it. In the meantime, however, some kind of award should go out to the Nashua murder defendant, Christopher Gribble (hereinafter, the “Defendant”. As you may know he is on trial for a gruesome murder and associated crimes in New Hampshire.

If such award ceremonies were held, this year’s award for the most stunningly grotesque would go to the Defendant for his testimony at trial, second only to the scene of the crime itself.

It should be noted that the Defendant has admitted that he and his buddy Steven Spader (hereinafter, “Co-Defendant Buddy”) killed 42-year-old Kimberly Cates and tried to kill her young daughter. However, he has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

While he was on the stand, the Defendant, during direct examination described in detail the details of the crimes he committed after he broke into the home and found his way to the bedroom where mother and daughter slept.
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Hello. How is your Saint Patrick’s/Evacuation Day going? Various Massachusetts policepeople are particularly on guard today against people who might stereotypically drink alittle too much. Folks do strange things when they are drunk, and this blog has discussed many such incidents. One incident today, however, leaves many wondering if the gentleman responsible was drunk, disturbed or something in between.

A yet-to-be-determined suspect, believed to be a man, we’ll call him “Newton Gunman”, had best meet with a Massachusetts Criminal Lawyer since he fired his gun in Newton in a very unsafe manner. The police say he is “armed and dangerous” after he fired multiple shots into the back door of a closed jewelry store today, according to law enforcement.

Newton Gunman is described as male, wearing a dark, collared jacket, and a hooded sweatshirt with jeans. According to the reports, Newton Gunman fired at least eight shots with his Newton handgun, silver in color, into a glass door at Cristofori Jewelers on Watertown Street just before 4:30 p.m.

While there were three employees inside, nobody was hurt..

Attorney Sam’s Take On Massachusetts Assault And Gun Crimes

Over the years, I have come upon various kinds of clients. Some say they don’t know what the Commonwealth is talking about when they bring nasty criminal allegations. Some have stories that make me think, “there but for the grace of G-d go I”. Others leaving me scratching my head and tilting it at various uncomfortable angles trying to find the one through which their little adventure seemed like a good idea at the time.
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You might think that the new charges being brought against the man who calls himself “Clark Rockefeller” is likely to be called “The State of California vs. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter”. It is likely, however, to have the subtitle of “Clark Rockefeller vs. Christia Karl Gerhartsreiter”…particularly if he has any thought of testifying on his own behalf or putting up any character witnesses.

First of all, let’s make all our lives easier and hereafter refer to him as the “Defendant”).

In case you have not heard, the Defendant, now resting semi-comfortably in Commonwealth involuntary housing, has now been charged with a new allegation. This time, it is the crime of a murder which apparently happened over 20 years ago. The authorities in California have filed a complaint in a Los Angeles County courthouse seeking the return of the Defendant to answer for said murder. The process for doing so is called ” extradition”. The issue in this process it whether the person seized is the right person the outside state, in this case California, is seeking. If and when that is established, then California will have a certain amount of time to come and get him…assuming Massachusetts lets him out of their custody to go to California. Since the states have interstate agreements that allow for the transfer of convicts between states so they can be prosecuted on other charges, and said charges involve murder, there is virtually no liklihood that Massahusetts will refuse to give him over.
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Yesterday, Wayne Leduc, 40, of Milton (hereinafter, “Trooper Crasher”) pleaded not guilty to charges of drunk driving and operating to endanger and went home after posting bail. One would hope that he was not his own transportation home, Either way, he had better be careful out there.

Simply put, it seems to be getting more and more dangerous to commute in any way here in the Commonwealth!

Trooper Crasher’s charges resulted from a little problem he is said to have had on Interstate 93 in Quincy. It happened on Sunday morning. According to the Commonwealth, he was involved in accident which injured a state trooper. Oh, yes…and they say he was under the influence of alcohol as well.

Apparently, the 43-year-old trooper had pulled over another vehicle at the spot in Quincy. He was standing in front of his cruiser when Trooper Crasher smashed into the rear of the cruiser, propelling it into the trooper, according to the state police.

The trooper suffered leg injuries and was taken to Boston Medical Center for treatment. Other troopers who responded to the scene arrested Trooper Crasher.

One might think that this type of thing does not happen very often. One would unfortunately be incorrect. For example, last Wednesday, another trooper was seriously injured on Route 30 in Framingham when his cruiser was struck head-on by a car that crossed the median. Further, in the past year, we have had several cases wherein troopers were stuck, sometimes killed, when vehicles struck them on various roads.
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We have discussed the matter of witness intimidation many times on this blog. This blog’s main purpose is to peel back the curtain of mystery on our criminal justice system and how it impacts you. For example, I have often pointed out how broad a law may be applied in court. Intimidation of a Witness is one such law.

Of course, you are unlikely to feel that Dorchester resident Trevor A. Watson, 44 (hereinafter, the “Defendant”) is a victim of confusion. He was sentenced last week to 30 years in prison for such a crime. Actually, he took it a bit further than what we usually see, apparently. He was convicted of trying to actually murder a federal informant.

I would expect that we all understand that doing something like that is illegal…on a number of fronts.

The case stems back a few years. The year 2000 in fact. Apparently, a cocaine trafficking investigation was ongoing against the Defendant by federal agents. Apparently unwilling to keep his defense to within the allowable guidelines, he went after one of the informants. “Went after” in this case means “stabbing around 10 times, causing damage to various organs”. According to the government, perhaps in an effort to eliminate any doubt, the Defendant made comments during the stabbing, such as, “You talking, huh? You telling?”

And so it was that the Defendant and an associate were awarded criminal charges other than drug trafficking…namely attempted murder.
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Foxboro is apparently tired of public drunkenness.

And, as we all know, when we decide we are against something…we push to make it illegal. Even if it already is basically illegal!!

Folks in Foxboro are now pushing to outlaw public drunkenness. The move is supported by many, including the parents of a young woman who was killed in 2008 after tailgating at Gillette Stadium.

“What’s it going to take, a couple more fatalities?” Steve Davis of Milton said as he and his wife baked a cake for what would have been their daughter’s 23rd birthday today.

On Monday, at a Town meeting, voters approved an article to impose a $200 fine for public drunkenness. This makes Foxboro the only Bay State municipality other than Dedham to pass such a bylaw, according to the state Attorney General’s Office, which must approve the measure.
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Chelsea Massachusetts was the scene of a violent bloody altercation on Friday.

Oscar Guttierez-Nunes, a 27-year-old Chelsea man (hereinafter, the “Defendant”) has been arrested and charged in said altercation. By the end of the altercation, one man was apparently dead and two others were wounded. One of those injured remains in critical condition at Massachusetts General Hospital. The police learned later about the third complainant who had admitted himself into MGH with non-life-threatening injuries
In case anybody wondered, the Defendant was also wounded. According to police, he admitted himself into the hospital under a false name.

The Defendant is currently being held without bail and stands charged with murder and two counts of armed assault with intent to murder and is due back in court on April 7th.

Right now, this is being described as an “attack”. We do not know what that means. Was the Defendant in an a fight with three other guys and somehow got the better part of the deal? Did he even get the “better part”? We know that he was injured as well and one of the others has “:non-life-threatening” injuries. Was he simply a lunatic who attacked a group of men with a knife?
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Today’s blog is a reminder. It is a reminder to those of us, in and out of the trenches of criminal justice about reality. We often proclaim that facing a criminal allegation, so long as the accused does not end up spending too many years in jail,is “no harm, no foul”. We figure that simply being accused is no big deal.

That is, until it happens to us.

Let’s look at the case of former Children’s Hospital Boston pediatrician Dr. Melvin D. Levine.

Dr. Levine was a former chief of ambulatory pediatrics at the hospital.

Dr. Levine was a Rhodes scholar and a best-selling author who had appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”.

Dr. Levine was then accused of molesting “thousands of his pediatric patients”. Never criminally charged…simply accused in a civil law suit.

Dr. Levine was shortly thereafter found dead in the woods near his home in North Carolina. According to authorities, he had shot himself in the forehead with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Before you take the suicide as some kind of admission of guilt, be aware that he not only left behind a suicide note, but also a journal that he had kept. To the end, Dr. Levine insisted that he was innocent.
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Wiilliam J. Halpin III, a 25-year-old Melrose man (hereinafter, the “Defendant”) is likely not looking toward this week with glee. According to the Commonwealth, he was a bit too gleeful Friday night. Self-induced narcotic-type of gleeful. In other words, he is accused of driving his SUV under the influence of drugs. But it does not end there.

He got into an accident which killed one man and wounded a six-year-old boy.

Today, he is due in court to face the resulting charges. The state police arrested and held him at the scene of the accident. The accident took place on Route 1 in Lynnfield. It is also alleged that the Defendant struck one, not two, vehicles.

According to the Commonwealth, the Defendant drove his SUV into a taxi cab and a second vehicle, both of which were in the breakdown lane near the Fat Cactus restaurant. Ironically, the accident occurred while those two drivers were in the midst of exchanging papers after a different, more minor, crash.

Victor Vargas, a 42-year-old taxi driver from Lynn and father of two, was later pronounced dead at North Shore Medical Center Union Hospital in Lynn.
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It’s stories like this that helps me love what I do for a living; you just never know what is going to happen next! Just when we see debacles like the one surrounding the Parole Board because of a recent police killing, and we see the predictable scurrying about by prosecutorial politicians to make sure that they cannot be splattered with blame, the Supreme Judicial Court takes the opposite tact. They look to uphold people’s rights…despite the likely public outcry.

Specifically, the court dealt with the case of Malcolm S. Maker, a 52-year-old convicted sex offender (hereinafter, the “Appellant” ). The Appellant had been convicted for failing to register his address with the Boston police department within two days of his release from jail, as required by the state Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB).

That is, until now.

The SJC now says that said rule is beyond SORB’s authority.

Apparently, the Appellant is not the most sympathetic of individuals. He has been designated a Level 3 sex offender, which is the type said to be most likely to reoffend. His history of convictions include various allegations of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior.

Then, in 2009, he was charged with failing to notify the police after he was released from jail that he would be living in a Boston homeless shelter. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail.

Then came the appeal.
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