Commonwealth v. Wright (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-146-14)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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-11501 COMMONWEALTH vs. EDWARD G. WRIGHT. Hampden. April 10, 2014. – August 20, 2014. Present: Ireland, C.J., Spina, Cordy, Botsford, Gants, Duffly, & Lenk, JJ.[1] Homicide. Practice, Criminal, New trial, Hearsay, Capital case. Evidence, Third-party culprit, Exculpatory, Opinion, Hearsay, Motive, Relevancy and materiality. Indictment found and returned in the Superior Court Department on June 7, 1984. Following review by this court, 411 Mass. 678 (1992), a motion for a new trial, filed on April 24, 2012, was considered by C. Jeffrey Kinder, J., and motions for reconsideration were considered by him. A request for leave to appeal was allowed by Botsford, J., in the Supreme Judicial Court for the county of Suffolk. Richard J. Fallon (Matthew A. Kamholtz with him) for the defendant. Dianne M. Dillon, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. 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 (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 […]