Commonwealth v. Winquist (Lawyers Weekly No. 11-085-15)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 13-P-1545 Appeals Court COMMONWEALTH vs. JAMES S. WINQUIST. No. 13-P-1545. Plymouth. February 4, 2015. – August 3, 2015. Present: Green, Grainger, & Massing, JJ. Joint Enterprise. Homicide. Evidence, Common criminal enterprise, Joint enterprise, Statement of codefendant, Acts and declarations of conspirator, Hearsay, Argument by prosecutor, Competency. Search and Seizure, Affidavit, Warrant, Probable cause. Practice, Criminal, Affidavit, Warrant, Hearsay, Argument by prosecutor. Witness, Competency. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on September 28, 2007. The cases were tried before Richard J. Chin, J. Leslie W. O’Brien for the defendant. Suzanne D. McDonough, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. MASSING, J. The defendant, James S. Winquist, appeals from two convictions of second-degree murder. He claims that two statements of Eric Snow, his joint venturer in the murders, were erroneously admitted against him as coconspirator statements; that the trial judge erred by denying his mid-trial request for a hearing under Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978); that the prosecutor’s closing argument was improper; and that a key witness, Kelly Burgess, was incompetent to testify. We affirm. Facts.[1] One morning in May, 2005, the badly decomposed bodies of two homeless men, William Chrapan and David Lyon, were discovered inside an abandoned cement bunker at Bare Cove Park in Hingham. The victims each had suffered complex skull fractures, the result of blunt force and “semi-sharp” injuries. Chrapan’s body was missing its right hand. The victims had been dead for approximately three weeks. Two months later, two men walking their dogs near the power lines on Elm Street in Bridgewater discovered the hand that had been severed from Chrapan’s body when one of their dogs ran off and returned carrying a plastic bag containing the hand. In September, 2007, more than two years after the discovery of the bodies, a grand jury indicted the defendant for the murders of Chrapan and Lyon. The defendant’s friend Eric Snow also was charged with the murders, but he committed suicide in jail in March, 2012, about six months before the trial commenced. The jurors did not hear any evidence about the charges against Snow or the reasons for his absence from the trial.[2] The defendant, Snow, and Michael Alfano were the core members of a group called the “Brotherhood of Blood” (Brotherhood), which Alfano had formed in prison so […]