Court Opinion

ID: 9743324
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:30:57.621741+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:40.585629
License: Public Domain

*290O’Connor, J.
(concurring, with whom Liacos, C.J., joins). “Fairness to a defendant in a criminal case requires the rule that the commission by him of an independent crime cannot ordinarily be shown as evidence tending to show the commission of the crime charged. (Citations omitted.) It does not follow that, because the defendant committed a similar of-fence on another occasion, he committed the crime for which he is being tried. And there is the danger that, because a defendant appears to be a bad man capable of, and likely to commit, such a crime as that charged, a jury might be led to dispense with proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he did actually .commit the crime charged. Moreover, it is not fair that a defendant in the course of a trial should be called upon to defend himself against accusations not set forth in the indictment.” Commonwealth v. Stone, 321 Mass. 471, 473 (1947). From the beginning, the rule expressed in Stone, supra, was subject to two exceptions. One exception allowed the introduction of evidence of a defendant’s unique modus operandi to identify him as the perpetrator of a crime shown to have been committed by someone in that extraordinary way. The other exception permitted the introduction of evidence that the conduct attributed to the defendant was part and parcel of an ongoing criminal scheme, which scheme explained the conduct and demonstrated the intent with which the defendant engaged in it.
The first exception, in my view, does not apply to this case. There was nothing unique about the method, shooting, by which the victim was killed, nor was there evidence concerning the method by which the defendant may have intended to kill the Jamaican hotel owner. The court, however, also relies on the second, “common scheme,” exception to conclude that evidence of the defendant’s earlier expressed intention to commit a substantially similar, but nevertheless totally independent, crime against a different victim was properly admitted to show the defendant’s malice. The evidence of the defendant’s earlier state of mind may have been at least marginally probative of the defendant’s later intention, but the two independent events were not segments of a larger *291ongoing scheme. Indeed, to the extent that the evidence concerning the defendant’s earlier statement that he intended to lure the hotel owner to this country so he could buy his hotel and then kill him said anything about the defendant’s intention toward the victim, it did so only by portraying the defendant as the kind of a man who would be apt to possess the mentality required for the homicide with which he was charged. That is precisely what the original other crime evidence rule prevented for the reasons expressed in Commonwealth v. Stone, supra, and set forth at the outset of this opinion.
I recognize that today’s decision with respect to the admissibility of other crime evidence is consistent with the court’s decisions in Commonwealth v. Helfant, 398 Mass. 214, 224-229 (1986), and Commonwealth v. King, 387 Mass. 464, 469-473 (1982), cases in which I dissented and which I continue to think were wrongly decided. For that reason, and also because the admissible evidence of guilt in this case was overwhelming, I concur in the court’s decision. However, I write separately to repeat my opposition to the court’s virtual abandonment of a sound rule grounded in fairness. I write with the hope that one day the court will reverse the “sharp retrogression in its sensitivity to the unfairness of admitting in a criminal case evidence of a defendant’s prior bad acts,” see Commonwealth v. Helfant, supra at 238 (O’Connor, J., dissenting), except in the rare circumstances accommodated in our pre-Helfant and King cases.