Commonwealth v. Evans
| Decision Date | 20 October 2014 |
| Docket Number | SJC–10873. |
| Citation | 469 Mass. 834,17 N.E.3d 1084 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. Thomas EVANS. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
Leslie W. O'Brien, Boston, for the defendant.
Fawn D. Balliro Andersen, Assistant District Attorney (John C. Verner, Assistant District Attorney, with her) for the Commonwealth.
Present: IRELAND, C.J., SPINA, CORDY, DUFFLY, & LENK, JJ.1
DUFFLY
, J.
The defendant was indicted for the armed robbery and murder of Paula Doherty. The victim was last seen alive on Saturday, September 30, 2006, at her Medford residence, where she, a friend, the defendant, and the defendant's nephew had been using cocaine. When the friend left at 5:30 p.m. that afternoon, the defendant had passed out in a chair in the victim's room and the victim was preparing to go to sleep. On Monday, October 2, after the victim failed to return telephone calls, the friend went to the victim's house to check on her, and discovered the body of the victim, who had been beaten to death. A Superior Court jury found the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree on theories of extreme atrocity or cruelty and felony-murder, with armed robbery as the predicate felony.
On appeal, the defendant contends that the trial judge erred in denying his motions for a required finding of not guilty, because the circumstantial evidence of guilt was insufficient to establish that the defendant was at the scene of the crime during the period when the victim was robbed and killed. The defendant argues also that the judge erred in allowing the admission of expert testimony concerning the potential absence of blood on the victim's killer. We conclude that there was no error requiring reversal and, after a careful review of the record, that there is no reason to exercise our authority under G.L. c. 278, § 33E
, to order a new trial or to reduce the murder conviction to a lesser degree of guilt.
1. Facts. Based on evidence introduced at trial, the jury could have found the following.
a. Events of September 28 to 30, 2006. The victim sold cocaine from her residence, including to the defendant, who lived two or three houses away. On Thursday, September 28, 2006, at the victim's request, the defendant and his nephew, Sean Kanode, drove the victim to a bank where the defendant cashed a check in the amount of $1,100, and handed the cash to the victim.2
The following day, Friday, at about 6 p.m. , the victim's childhood friend, Jean McCarthy, arrived at the victim's home in Medford, where they planned to use cocaine, consume alcohol, and play cards.
The victim had been in the process of renovating the house, and although there was electricity, there was no running water, some windows were missing, and some walls were torn down. Tools were scattered throughout the interior, including
saws, drills, hammers, and crowbars. The victim led McCarthy to a back room, which the victim had set up as her living space. The bed, consisting of two mattresses on the floor, piled on top of each other, was in a corner, with one side flush along a wall and a chair at its foot. When McCarthy arrived, the defendant and Kanode were present. The four spent the rest of that evening and the early morning hours of Saturday drinking, using cocaine, and playing cards; McCarthy gave the victim $50 for some cocaine, which the victim put into her pants pocket; the victim kept cocaine in another pocket. Kanode left at approximately 5 a.m. on Saturday morning, but the others stayed until late in the afternoon.
Over the course of that period, a number of people arrived at the house in order to purchase cocaine, after telephoning the victim to arrange the transaction. While some transactions took place elsewhere in the apartment, at least three people came into the back room to conduct the transaction. Each of the three paid in cash, which the victim placed in her pants pocket. The defendant was present for each transaction that took place in the back room. At no point during the period from Friday evening through the late afternoon on Saturday did McCarthy see the defendant with any money, although at some point on Saturday the defendant left and returned a short time later with an antique clock to trade for money or drugs. At approximately 5:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, as McCarthy was preparing to return to her home, the defendant appeared to be passed out in the chair at the foot of the victim's bed, and the victim was lying down and seemed sleepy. As she left, McCarthy told the victim to get up and lock the door behind her, and the victim did so.
Soon after McCarthy left, Barbara Welch, one of the victim's customers from the previous night, began to call the victim on her cellular telephone, but was unable to reach her. A call Welch placed to the victim's telephone around 6 p.m. was answered by a male; when Welch asked him if “Paula” was there, he responded that she was asleep. On Sunday, October 1, Welch tried to telephone the victim many times, but there was no answer, and, contrary to her usual practice, the victim did not return Welch's calls.
b. Discovery of victim's body. On the evening of Monday, October 2, after the victim had failed to return telephone calls placed the previous day, McCarthy went to the victim's house to check on her. McCarthy found the porch door standing open, the front door to the house unlocked, and the victim dead in the back
room. Her body was partially on the bed. Everything else appeared to be almost exactly as it had been when McCarthy left the previous Saturday at 5:30 p.m. Responding police officers observed that the victim was lying diagonally across the mattress, face down, with her head towards the corner of the room and her left shoulder resting on the floor. After an initial sweep to secure the house, police contacted emergency medical services.
c. Police investigation. At approximately 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning, police began a canvass of the neighborhood. Later that morning, State Police Trooper Michael Banks observed the defendant and Kanode sitting on the front steps of their house a few doors away. Banks and other officers asked the two whether they had seen anything unusual at the victim's home, and they replied in the negative. The following day, after police interviewed McCarthy, Banks returned to the defendant's house and asked him if he would speak with police. The defendant and Kanode drove to the police station and were interviewed.
i. Defendant's first statement. The defendant told police that he knew the victim because she lived down the street, and that he had purchased cocaine from her in the past. He recently had relapsed and had gone to her house on Saturday, where he had stayed from approximately 8:30 a.m. until about 2 or 3 p.m. He brought an antique clock to the victim's house, for which he received $30 that he used to purchase an “8–ball” of cocaine, and left when he had run out of money to purchase additional cocaine. The defendant then walked to a nearby park to consume his remaining cocaine, returned home, and went to bed.
ii. Events at the James Street house. After comparing the defendant's statement with that of his nephew, police subpoenaed the telephone records for the defendant's landline in order to look for an incoming call that Kanode said the defendant made on Sunday night, October 1. Police determined that he had made the call from Peter Milonopoulos's landline telephone at his house on Pearl Street in Somerville. Milonopoulos testified that he had seen the defendant arrive at the house of his friend, Michael Wolfe, who lived around the corner on James Street, at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. on Saturday, September 30.
The James Street house was the home of Gary Young, Wolfe's uncle and a longtime friend of the defendant, and Young's girl friend, Madeline Osborne, and also was a “crack house” where people gathered to purchase and use drugs, including “crack” cocaine. Wolfe, who had been released from jail at 7:05 p.m. that
evening and arrived home approximately forty minutes later, testified that the defendant had arrived at the James Street house after 8:30 p.m.3 Young and Osborne said that the defendant was at their house twice on Saturday, once earlier in the day, while it was still light out, and then later that night.4 Osborne said that the defendant returned sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight; he appeared a little shaky and nervous, and told everyone in the house that if anyone came looking for him, he was not there.
The defendant told Young that he had been working that day and that he cut his finger while cleaning gutters. Young thought the defendant's pants appeared dirty and “painted,” and that the defendant might have wiped the blood from the cut onto his pants.5 At some point during the night, the defendant asked Young if he could borrow some clothes because his were dirty. Although the defendant was not seen with more than $40 while he was at the victim's house from Friday evening through Saturday at 5:30 p.m. , he had cocaine and a considerable amount of cash when he arrived at the James Street house. In total, witnesses at the house observed the defendant spend hundreds of dollars, making at least two purchases of cocaine during the evening of Saturday, September 30, and into the early morning hours of Sunday, October 1.6
At some point, the defendant asked Osborne to wash the clothes he had been wearing when he arrived and some other laundry he had with him.7 During the day on Sunday, Osborne took the clothes the defendant had been wearing, as well as two of his shirts and a pair of pants, some clothes belonging to Young, and some of her own clothes, to a nearby laundry. She saw a
maroon stain on one pair of pants. In the ten to fifteen years that they had known each other, the defendant had not previously asked her to do his laundry.
iii. Defendant's second statement. On the evening of October 6, 2006, police again requested that the defendant come to the police...
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