Court Opinion

ID: 9543664
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:47:51.670884+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:10:52.124172
License: Public Domain

*619Nolan, J.
(dissenting). I dissent. The issue is a narrow one, i.e., the legal sufficiency of the evidence tending to prove that the defendant had a gun when he robbed the victim.
The defendant, with his hand in his jacket, said that he would “pull the trigger” if the victim did not comply with his demand for money. This declaration of intent or threat in the context of this case is an evidentiary admission from which the jury may infer that he was then carrying a gun. See P.J. Liacos, Massachusetts Evidence 275-281 (5th ed. 1981). At the least, such a statement, if the jury believe that he made it, should be regarded as “enough evidence that could have satisfied a rational trier of fact . . . beyond a reasonable doubt” that the defendant had a gun. Commonwealth v. Latimore, 378 Mass. 671, 677-678 (1979). A different case is presented (and a different result is demanded) if one who declares that he has a gun is apprehended immediately after such declaration and found to be unarmed. This is not our case, however. Here, he could have disposed of the gun between the vestibule and the alley. For the purpose of ruling on a motion for directed verdict (now denominated a motion for required finding of not guilty, Mass. R. Crim. P. 25 [b], 378 Mass. 896 [1979]), it is not controlling that the victim never saw the gun and that no gun was found at the scene. In Commonwealth v. Delgado, 367 Mass. 432, 436-437 (1975), there was no direct evidence of a gun, a gun was not seen by the victim, and no gun was found on the defendant’s person or at the scene of the defendant’s arrest. The only evidence of the presence of a gun was the defendant’s statement: “Hold him or I’m going to shoot him.” Id. at 436. On the issue whether this was sufficient evidence on which to find that the defendant had a gun, this court said “that the defendant should be taken at his word.” Id. at 437. So, too, in the present case, the jury should have been permitted to take the defendant at his word that he had a gun.