Commonwealth v. Moffat
| Decision Date | 12 November 2020 |
| Docket Number | SJC-08733 |
| Citation | 157 N.E.3d 45,486 Mass. 193 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. Shane MOFFAT. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
Merritt Schnipper for the defendant.
Cynthia Cullen Payne, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.
Present: Gants, C.J., Lenk, Gaziano, Lowy, & Budd, JJ.1
In October 2001, a jury convicted the defendant, Shane Moffat, of murder in the first degree for the shooting death of Malcolm Howard.2 The defendant seeks reversal of his conviction, arguing that (1) the Commonwealth violated the defendant's due process rights by failing to investigate evidence that contradicted its trial theory and by presenting a trial theory that it knew or had reason to know was false; (2) two lay witnesses improperly testified as to the defendant's guilt without personal knowledge, violating the defendant's due process rights; (3) during closing argument, the prosecutor improperly urged the jury to draw an inference of guilt against the defendant due to his court room behavior; (4) the trial judge erred by providing incomplete jury instructions regarding circumstantial evidence; (5) trial counsel provided ineffective assistance for various reasons, including by failing to investigate third-party culprit evidence; and (6) the motion judges erred in denying the defendant's motions for postconviction discovery. The defendant also requests that we exercise our power pursuant to G. L. c. 278, § 33E, to grant him a new trial. Finding neither reversible error nor reason to exercise our authority under § 33E, we affirm.
Background. "We recite the evidence in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, reserving certain details for later discussion." Commonwealth v. Tavares, 484 Mass. 650, 651, 144 N.E.3d 268 (2020).
1. The murder and aftermath. During a meeting on May 10, 1999, the defendant offered to procure cocaine for the victim and the victim's cousin, George Marshall. Three days later, the victim's girlfriend gave the victim $1,300 to purchase drugs from the defendant. Later that day, at around 11 A.M. , Marshall drove the victim to meet the defendant in Marshall's fiancée's car, which was a Toyota. The defendant told Marshall that the defendant and the victim had to meet the cocaine distributor elsewhere, and that Marshall could not come. Marshall let the victim borrow the Toyota, and the victim agreed that he would return in time for Marshall to be able to pick up his daughter later that afternoon. The victim drove away with the defendant at around 1:30 P.M.
The victim first drove the defendant to the defendant's mother's house, where the defendant retrieved his mail. The victim then drove the defendant to Fred Jackson Road in Southwick, and shortly thereafter, the victim was shot with a shotgun. At 3:11 P.M. , the defendant used the victim's cell phone to place a call. The cell phone signal from that call corresponded with a cell tower within three to five miles of Fred Jackson Road.
After the victim did not return with the Toyota by the promised time, Marshall attempted to contact both the victim and the defendant. The defendant told Marshall that the defendant had not seen or heard from the victim since earlier that day when the victim had dropped off the defendant. Later that night, Marshall and the victim's girlfriend confronted the defendant about the victim's whereabouts, and the defendant again denied any knowledge.
That same evening, the defendant and his friend, Jarod Thompson, took a taxicab to various locations, including one location where the defendant and Thompson disposed of a shotgun barrel in a storm drain. During the ride, the defendant showed Thompson a shirt with blood on it. The defendant also left a bag in the taxicab, which contained the boots the defendant was wearing during the murder.
2. The investigation. On May 16, 1999, a man discovered the victim's body lying on the side of an embankment on Fred Jackson Road.3 An autopsy later revealed that the victim's cause of death was a close range shotgun wound to his neck. On May 18, 1999, the Toyota was discovered outside an abandoned factory, and the driver's seat was soaked with blood. Officers recovered the victim's baseball cap from the brush next to the Toyota and the defendant's mail, which bore his mother's address, from the front passenger seat.
The police later recovered from the storm drain the shotgun barrel, which was consistent with the type of shotgun used to murder the victim. The police also recovered from the taxicab a bag containing the defendant's boots and later determined that the victim's deoxyribonucleic acid was on the defendant's right boot.
3. Arrest and police interviews. On May 21, 1999, a warrant issued for the defendant's arrest. Shortly thereafter, the police went to Thompson's house looking for the defendant, but they did not find him there.4 The defendant fled to New York, and then to Florida, where police there arrested him several months later on an unrelated charge.5 Over the course of several interviews with the defendant, both in Florida and in Massachusetts, the defendant provided the Massachusetts police officers with three different versions of the murder.6
First, the defendant claimed that when he could not reach the cocaine distributor, a man named "Ayah," the victim dropped off the defendant, and the defendant did not see the victim again. Three days after the murder, a girl approached the defendant and handed him a bag containing three shotguns. The defendant gave two away, and because the third smelled like it had just been fired, he dismantled it and disposed of it in the storm drain.
The detectives then informed the defendant that the police had recovered the shotgun barrel and the defendant's boots from the taxicab, and that the police knew the defendant had used the victim's cell phone. The defendant then asked the detectives, "Why would I murder somebody for just thirteen hundred dollars[?]"
In his second version of events, the defendant claimed that he had brought the victim to meet Ayah and someone named Quentin. Upon their arrival, Ayah and Quentin entered the backseat of the Toyota, while the defendant sat in the front passenger's seat, and the victim sat in the driver's seat. As the four men talked, the defendant heard a loud bang and saw the victim slump over the steering wheel. The defendant then helped remove the victim's body from the car and placed it in the trunk of Ayah and Quentin's car. The defendant drove the blood-soaked Toyota to Hartford. He accused Ayah and Quentin of framing him, claiming that Ayah and Quentin both wore surgical gloves, while he did not, and that he had let Ayah borrow his boots.
Following the defendant's second version, the detectives gave the defendant a copy of Thompson's statement and photographs of the shotgun and the taxicab. The detectives reviewed the evidence against the defendant, and the defendant acknowledged that the police had enough evidence to convict. The interview was then interrupted, and when it resumed a couple months later, the defendant offered a third version of events.7
In this third version, the defendant, Marshall, and the victim met Ayah and Quentin at a convenience store. The defendant and the victim then followed Ayah and Quentin in the Toyota to a gasoline station and then to Fred Jackson Road, stopping in between to retrieve the defendant's mail from his mother's house. Once there, Ayah and Quentin got out of their car, and Quentin shot the victim while standing behind the driver's side window. Ayah and Quentin then removed the victim's body from the Toyota and dropped him down the embankment. After, Ayah drove the defendant away from the scene in Ayah's car, and Quentin drove the Toyota to Hartford.
As to motive, the defendant offered that the victim was killed because Marshall and the victim had robbed someone in New York City during a drug deal. The defendant admitted that he owned the murder weapon, that he had disposed of it, and that his fingerprints were on it. The defendant then agreed to take police to the murder location. Once at the murder site on Fred Jackson Road, the defendant admitted that he, not Ayah, had been wearing his boots during the murder, but he could not explain how the victim's blood had ended up on them.
4. The trial. During his trial testimony, the defendant acknowledged that he was present during the murder, but he claimed that he did not shoot the victim and that he did not know that Ayah and Quentin had planned to do so. The defendant largely reiterated his third version of events, but he denied that the murder weapon belonged to him. On October 11, 2001, the jury convicted the defendant of murder in the first degree on the theories of felony-murder and deliberate premeditation. The defendant was sentenced and filed a notice of appeal the following day. Over the subsequent seventeen years, the defendant filed multiple postconviction motions.8 We consolidated the defendant's direct appeal from his conviction of murder in the first degree with his appeals from the denials of some of those motions.
Discussion. 1. Commonwealth's improper trial theory. One week prior to trial, the Commonwealth received a heavily redacted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report from the United States Attorney's office, which contained a portion of an FBI interview of someone named Desmond Wolfe from December 9, 1999. The FBI report, which the defendant possessed prior to trial, stated:
9
The Commonwealth's theory at trial was that the defendant acted alone. Conversely...
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