Commonwealth v. Snyder (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-143-16)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 SJC-09203 COMMONWEALTH vs. ERIC SNYDER. Norfolk. May 6, 2016. – September 8, 2016. Present: Gants, C.J., Cordy, Duffly, Lenk, & Hines, JJ.[1] Homicide. Evidence, Expert opinion, Identification, Relevancy and materiality. Witness, Expert. Practice, Criminal, Capital case, Sentence, Execution of sentence. Indictment found and returned in the Superior Court Department on February 8, 2000. The case was tried before Robert A. Mulligan, J. Dana Alan Curhan (Victoria L. Nadel & Roger Witkin with him) for the defendant. Stephanie Martin Glennon, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. LENK, J. In March, 2003, the defendant was convicted by a Superior Court jury of murder in the first degree, on a theory of deliberate premeditation, in the 1994 shooting death of Joseph O’Reilly in Quincy. On direct appeal from that conviction, the defendant argues that the judge erred in not allowing the admission of testimony by an expert on eyewitness identification, and in allowing the admission of testimony concerning a stocking cap with eye holes that was seized from a vehicle the defendant was driving several months after the shooting. The defendant also seeks relief under G. L. c. 278, § 33E, and asks that his sentence be revised to run concurrently with an unrelated Federal sentence he was serving at the time of his conviction. Having reviewed the record, we affirm the conviction and discern no reason to exercise our authority to grant extraordinary relief.[2] Because the defendant’s motion to revise and revoke his sentence was timely filed on the day of sentencing, but has not been acted upon, we remand the matter to the Superior Court for consideration of his pending motion. Facts. We recite the facts the jury could have found, reserving certain details for later discussion. At approximately 6:45 P.M. on September 29, 1994, Joseph O’Reilly was shot to death outside his girl friend’s apartment on Quincy Shore Drive in Quincy. Police quickly responded to the scene. The victim’s girl friend, Patricia Licciardi, reported hearing someone yell, “Hey, O’Reilly, we got you now,” followed by four to five gunshots. One of Licciardi’s neighbors informed police that she had seen two white males in their twenties or early thirties in flight immediately after the shooting. Initial efforts by police to locate the attackers were unsuccessful, but interviews with area residents indicated […]