Commonwealth v. Velez (Lawyers Weekly No. 11-158-14)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 13-P-1334 Appeals Court COMMONWEALTH vs. WILLIAM VELEZ. No. 13-P-1334. Suffolk. November 3, 2014. – December 9, 2014. Present: Grainger, Rubin, & Hanlon, JJ. Imprisonment, Credit for time served. Practice, Criminal, Sentence, Probation. Indictment found and returned in the Superior Court Department on September 3, 2009. A motion for pretrial confinement credit, filed on April 17, 2013, was considered by Frances A. McIntyre, J. Rebecca A. Jacobstein for the defendant. Helle Sachse, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. HANLON, J. The defendant appeals from the partial denial of his motion for pretrial confinement credits on the sentence imposed on his probation revocation, claiming that he is entitled to an additional fifty-six days of credit for time he spent in jail awaiting trial on what he describes as unrelated charges. We affirm in part and reverse in part. Background. “As with most sentencing disputes, a specific chronology is useful to clarify the issues.” Commonwealth v. Holmes, 83 Mass. App. Ct. 737, 737 (2013), S.C., 469 Mass. 1010 (2014). At various times during the period at issue, the defendant had three unrelated, open criminal charges — an assault and battery charge, an unarmed robbery charge that was reduced to larceny from the person, and a charge of failure to register as a sex offender. It is the failure to register charge that is primarily at issue in this case; it arose in the Waltham District Court, which issued a criminal complaint for that offense on May 8, 2009. The defendant was arraigned on July 22, 2009, and was held at the Nashua Street jail on $ 5,000 bail from the July 22, arraignment date until at least August 24, 2009.[1] The docket sheet in the record does not indicate that bail ever was posted or reduced; however, the parties appeared to agree that the defendant was not held on that charge after August 24, 2009, apparently in reliance on the letter from the keeper of the records at the Nashua Street jail. See note 1, supra. However, the District Court docket sheet also shows that, on August 24, 2009, the failure to register case was continued to September 29, 2009, with the notation “Habe to Nashua St. Jail same bail $ 5/0′.” From this, we conclude that, although the defendant was held in […]