Commonwealth v. Wright

• Decision Date: 20 August 2014
• Docket Number: SJC–11501.
• Citation: 14 N.E.3d 294,469 Mass. 447
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Edward G. WRIGHT.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

469 Mass. 447

14 N.E.3d 294

COMMONWEALTH

v.Edward G. WRIGHT.

SJC–11501.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Hampden.

Argued April 10, 2014.

Decided Aug. 20, 2014.

Richard J. Fallon, West Acton (Matthew A. Kamholtz, Boston, with him) for the defendant.

Dianne M. Dillon, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.

Present: IRELAND, C.J., SPINA, CORDY, BOTSFORD, GANTS, DUFFLY, & LENK, JJ.¹

Opinion

GANTS, J.

On April 10, 1985, the defendant, Edward G. Wright, was convicted by a jury of murder in the first degree on the theories of deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty. We affirmed the defendant's conviction and the denials of his first and second motions for a new trial. Commonwealth v. Wright, 411 Mass. 678, 683, 686–689, 691, 584 N.E.2d 621 (1992). After various proceedings, which we will detail below, the defendant, in April, 2012, filed his fifth motion for a new trial, arguing, insofar as relevant here, that newly discovered evidence in the form of

third-party culprit evidence warranted a new trial. The motion was denied without an evidentiary hearing, as were motions for reconsideration. The defendant then petitioned a single justice of this court, pursuant to the “gatekeeper” provision of G.L. c. 278, § 33E, for leave to appeal the denial of his fifth motion for a new trial. The single justice allowed the appeal to proceed. We now affirm the denial of the motion.

1. Trial. We set forth the relevant facts as detailed in our earlier opinion, which we supplement in footnotes:

“In the afternoon of May 14, 1984, officers of the Springfield police department found the victim's body with more than sixty stab wounds in her second-floor apartment at 306 Dwight Street Extension.^{[ 2 , 3 ]} There was evidence that she had died between 12:15 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. that day. A neighbor heard a woman screaming for about fifteen minutes shortly before 4 a.m.^{[ 4 ]} He then heard a motor vehicle start up and leave the area.

“There was evidence from which the jury could have found the following. About 12:45 a.m. on May 14, the defendant and the victim left a motor vehicle that the defendant had borrowed from a friend [Vernal Tyrone Archie] and entered the victim's apartment. At daybreak, the defendant returned to [Archie's] apartment.^{[ 5 ]} [Archie] thereupon drove the defendant to Delaware, leaving about 8 a.m. Shortly after the victim's body was discovered, the defendant called one Arthur Turner.^{[ 6 ]} Turner lived with his mother, who previously had been the woman friend of the defen dant.^{[ 7 ]} The defendant told Turner that he had killed someone and gave the victim's address. He described the victim as a ‘white bitch [on tic]’ ^{[ 8 ]} and said he had stabbed her with a knife that had a fourteen-inch blade because she had fired a gun at him. On the next day, Turner read about the victim's murder, and on May 16, he gave a statement to the police [that recounted the defendant's telephone call to him on May 14].^[ [^{9 ]}

“Evidence of blood in the victim's apartment and in the borrowed motor vehicle tended to prove the defendant's guilt. A bloody imprint made by a shoe on the tiled kitchen floor of the victim's apartment could have been made by a sneaker that the defendant was wearing when he was interviewed by Springfield police after Wilmington, Delaware, police had arrested him on May 16 at his sister's home.^{[ 10 ]} There were traces of occult blood [blood not visible to the eye, but detectable by chemicals], possibly of fairly recent origin, on the steering wheel, headlight switch, inside door handle, and other parts of the motor vehicle [including the direction signal and accelerator pedal] that the defendant had borrowed on the night of the murder.

“The defendant testified that he had met the victim [whom he had known] at a nightclub and had later driven her to her apartment, [arriving at about midnight] with several intermittent stops.^{[ 11 ]} They talked for about an hour, and, when he left [sometime between 1 and 1:30 a.m. ], she let him out of her apartment. The defendant denied calling Arthur Turner from Delaware on May 14.”

Wright, 411 Mass. at 679–680, 584 N.E.2d 621.

We describe some additional evidence that was not set forth in Wright, supra, but is relevant to this appeal. During his testimony at trial, the defendant offered a possible explanation for the presence of blood in Archie's automobile. He testified that, on May 7, 1984, he had been “brutally” attacked and stabbed. Archie drove the defendant to the hospital in Archie's automobile, arriving at about midnight. During the ride there, the defendant had been “bleeding pretty bad.” The hospital record was entered in evidence, as were photographs of the defendant's injuries.

Significant to this appeal is the testimony of the defendant concerning the events that transpired before he and the victim went to her apartment. The defendant testified that, at about 10 p.m. on May 13, he went to the nightclub where the victim worked and met her there. Before they left, the victim had a conversation with Andrew Jefferson, whom the defendant knew.¹² After that, the defendant and the victim went to Archie's automobile, and the defendant turned the vehicle around in a nearby parking lot. In the parking lot, the vehicle stopped and the victim got out and went back to the nightclub. Allen G. Smalls,¹³ who had been outside, went inside the nightclub when the victim was crossing the street.

The defendant left to get gasoline and then returned, entering the nightclub. The defendant testified that, as he and the victim

were leaving, Smalls grabbed the victim and caused her to drop her purse, the contents of which spilled onto the floor. The defendant recounted that Smalls reached down and picked up one of the items that had come from the victim's purse and placed it in his pocket. Smalls and the victim exchanged words in a “loud tone of voice,” and Smalls followed the victim and the defendant to the nightclub's exit and watched as the victim entered the automobile with the defendant.

The defense called several witnesses in addition to the defendant. The first witness was a man who lived in the victim's apartment building. He testified that, on May 14, at around 9:30 or 10 a.m., he heard banging and observed a man, whom he had seen with the victim previously, knocking on the victim's door.¹⁴ The man was Jefferson.

The defendant's sister and her boy friend also testified. The defendant's sister testified that, on May 14, from her home in Delaware, she had telephoned Turner and had made two other calls that appeared on a printout of the telephone records for her telephone number. Her boy friend testified that she was the only one using the telephone that day.

In rebuttal, the Commonwealth called the sister of Turner's mother, who testified that, on May 14, she had received a telephone call from the defendant (not his sister) asking for the telephone numbers of Turner and Turner's sister. The defendant informed her that he had arrived in Delaware without a problem.¹⁵

In re-rebuttal, the defense called Turner's mother, who testified that her sister had stated to her that she had not spoken with the defendant on May 14. During cross-examination, Turner's mother stated that the defendant currently was her boy friend and that she had been visiting him regularly during the time that he was detained.

2. New trial motions and other procedural history. Before we heard the defendant's appeal from his conviction, he filed his first and second motions for a new trial. His first new trial motion was based, as relevant here, on newly discovered evidence that Smalls

had made a statement in late April, 1985, admitting to having killed the victim. The evidence took the form of an affidavit from Smalls's mother, Lee Britt, dated January 13, 1986, in which she averred, insofar as relevant here, to the following. In April, 1985, after the defendant's trial had ended, she had visited Smalls and his then girl friend, Maria Rivera, in Florida. There, Rivera told her that, in 1984 after the victim had been killed, Smalls had threatened to kill Rivera, stating, “I will kill you just like I did [the victim].” Rivera added that she thought that Smalls was “only trying to scare her.” On May 12, 1985, Britt asked Smalls on the telephone whether he had killed the victim and he denied doing so, adding that everyone else had forgotten about the murder after the defendant's conviction as should she, and that the victim was better off dead because her life had been “a Hell” and she had been miserable. In another telephone conversation Smalls had admitted to Britt to having told Rivera that he had killed the victim, but stated that he only said these words out of anger “to scare her.” Further, Britt's husband told her that Smalls knocked on the back door and woke him up at 3:30 a.m. on May 14. Britt averred that Smalls had not told her the truth about the time of his arrival home, because he had said that he “came straight home that morning” after getting a “ticket” on the “early morning” of May 14 for “going down a one way street on his moped.” She also attested that, “[a] few days after the murder,” Smalls came home with some record albums and a small gold purse that he said belonged to the victim and that he had taken from the victim's apartment by “breaking through a window” to gain entry. She added that her daughter, Cynthia Harris, told her on May 14 that Smalls was trying to sell a large hunting knife.¹⁶

At an evidentiary hearing on the motion, Britt testified to the content of her affidavit. She also testified that, at the time of the defendant's trial, Smalls was residing in Florida. He had moved there about seven or eight months after the murder. At the time of her testimony at the evidentiary hearing, on October 7, 1986, Smalls was living with Britt. He had returned from Florida “just a few months ago.” Britt testified that Rivera was then living in Springfield and she last had seen her about two...