Commonwealth v. Wood (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-136-14)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports. If you find a typographical error or other formal error, please notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Judicial Court, John Adams Courthouse, 1 Pemberton Square, Suite 2500, Boston, MA, 02108-1750; (617) 557-1030; SJCReporter@sjc.state.ma.us SJC-10977 COMMONWEALTH vs. WILLIAM WOOD. Suffolk. March 7, 2014. – August 7, 2014. Present: Ireland, C.J., Cordy, Botsford, Gants, & Lenk, JJ.[1] Homicide. Felony-Murder Rule. Robbery. Evidence, Third-party culprit, Relevancy and materiality, Hearsay, Prior misconduct, Joint venturer, Expert opinion, Testimony before grand jury. Jury and Jurors. Constitutional Law, Confrontation of witnesses. Witness, Expert. Perjury. Grand Jury. Practice, Criminal, Capital case, Hearsay, Jury and jurors, Confrontation of witnesses, Argument by prosecutor, Grand jury proceedings, Conduct of prosecutor, Verdict, Question by jury, Duplicative convictions. Joint Enterprise. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on May 4, 2004. The cases were tried before Patrick F. Brady, J. Stephen Neyman for the defendant. Cailin M. Campbell, Assistant District Attorney (Patrick Haggan, Assistant District Attorney, with him) for the Commonwealth. CORDY, J. In the early morning hours of February 13, 2004, Betsy Tripp was bound with telephone wire and murdered in her home, a condominium on Monsignor Way in the Dorchester section of Boston. Her throat was slit. The man who shared the condominium with her, Morris Thompson, was shot in the face, coming close to death, and losing an eye. The perpetrators fled in a vehicle that Thompson had borrowed from a neighbor in the condominium complex and for which Thompson had the keys. The vehicle was abandoned in the parking lot of a Dorchester elementary school and set ablaze shortly after 2 A.M. that same morning. Thompson survived his wounds and accused the defendant, William Wood, and Wood’s friend, Quincy Butler, of committing the crimes in the course of a botched kidnapping and robbery attempt. Both were charged with murder and related crimes,[2] and were tried together. There were four trials. Two ended in mistrials when the jury were unable to unanimously agree on a verdict. A third resulted in mistrial when the trial judge became ill during trial. At the fourth trial, which is the subject of this appeal, the defendant was convicted of murder in the first degree on theories of felony-murder and extreme atrocity or cruelty.[3] Butler was convicted of murder in the second degree, and his appeal is pending in the Appeals Court. As outlined further below, the principal witnesses for the Commonwealth were Thompson and Butler’s former roommate and girl friend at the time […]