Commonwealth v. Lugo (Lawyers Weekly No. 11-033-16)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 14-P-1208 Appeals Court COMMONWEALTH vs. JOSE LUGO. No. 14-P-1208. Suffolk. November 9, 2015. – March 18, 2016. Present: Cypher, Trainor, & Rubin, JJ. Assault and Battery by Means of a Dangerous Weapon. Joint Enterprise. Evidence, Joint venturer, Knife. Practice, Criminal, Argument by prosecutor, Instructions to jury. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on June 27, 2012. The cases were tried before Linda E. Giles, J. Jacob B. Stone for the defendant. Matthew T. Sears, Assistant District Attorney (Megan E. O’Rourke, Assistant District Attorney, with him) for the Commonwealth. CYPHER, J. The defendant, Jose Lugo, appeals from his convictions by a jury of assault and battery with a knife, assault and battery with a shod foot, and assault with a knife. He argues that the trial judge’s denial of his motions for a required finding of not guilty was error because there was insufficient evidence of his participation in a joint venture to support his convictions of assault and battery with a knife and assault with a knife. He claims error also in the prosecutor’s closing argument and the jury instructions on prior inconsistent statements. We affirm the defendant’s convictions. Background. On April 12, 2012, friends Victor Ramos, Milton Henriquez, Edwin Colon, and Alejandro Naranjo spent the evening together at a Boston nightclub. At closing time, around 2:00 A.M., the four friends returned to their car, which was parked across the street in a multilevel garage. Waiting in a line of vehicles to exit the garage, the friends were approached by a man from a vehicle in front of theirs who, thinking that they had been honking the horn, punched Colon and Naranjo through their open passenger’s side windows. The four friends got out of their car and Henriquez traded blows with the man before being separated by the friends and others from surrounding vehicles. When the brawl subsided and the crowd of people who had gathered to watch or take part in the fight began to disperse, a sport utility vehicle (SUV) from an upper level of the garage approached the area and stopped and two men emerged. One was a tall, skinny man, later identified as Javier Fernandez, and the other was a short man with braids, later identified as the defendant. According to testimony […]