Commonwealth v. Greineder (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-042-13)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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‑08866a COMMONWEALTH vs. DIRK K. GREINEDER. Norfolk. November 8, 2012. ‑ March 14, 2013. Present: Ireland, C.J., Spina, Cordy, Botsford, Gants, Duffly, & Lenk, JJ. Constitutional Law, Confrontation of witnesses. Practice, Criminal, Confrontation of witnesses, Hearsay, Witness. Evidence, Expert opinion, Hearsay. Witness, Expert. Deoxyribonucleic Acid. Indictment found and returned in the Superior Court Department on February 29, 2000. The case was tried before Paul A. Chernoff, J., and an amended motion for a new trial, filed on July 27, 2005, was heard by him. James L. Sultan for the defendant. Varsha Kukafka, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. The following submitted briefs for amici curiae: Claudia Leis Bolgen for Committee for Public Counsel Services. Inna Landsman for Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Martha Coakley, Attorney General, & Susanne G. Reardon, Assistant Attorney General, for the Attorney General & others. SPINA, J. This case is again before us after the United States Supreme Court, in Greineder v. Massachusetts, 133 S. Ct. 55 (2012), vacated the judgment and remanded Commonwealth v. Greineder, 458 Mass. 207 (2010) (Greineder), to this court. The remand came with instructions to give the case further consideration in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Illinois, 132 S. Ct. 2221 (2012) (Williams). Our review proceeds accordingly, and we conclude that Williams does not require us to change our jurisprudence.[1] Therefore, we affirm the defendant’s conviction and the order denying his motion for a new trial. 1. Greineder. A recitation of the underlying facts is unnecessary as the facts have been fully set forth in our decision in Greineder, supra, which we incorporate by reference. We do, however, briefly recount our previous determination that the trial judge properly admitted the expert opinion of Dr. Robin Cotton, the forensic laboratory director of Cellmark Diagnostics laboratory (Cellmark), a private deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing laboratory, that the defendant’s DNA matched the DNA found on a knife and two gloves recovered from the crime scene, despite Cotton’s reliance on the DNA test results obtained by a nontestifying analyst to form the basis of her opinion. Greineder, supra at 236. We held that such expert opinion testimony did not violate the defendant’s confrontation right pursuant to the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution[2] […]