Concord Dispatch – Legal News

Police officers are often required to make difficult decisions with incomplete information when they arrest someone for OUI. When they pull over a driver and have a suspicion that the driver may have consumed alcohol, they need to determine whether there is probable cause that the driver is “under the influence” (OUI) in a legal…

Police departments in Concord, Massachusetts and several nearby towns now use body cameras and dashboard mounted cameras to record interactions with motorists. This represents an extremely important development in the way that OUI cases are handled by prosecutors and defense attorneys. Previously, OUI defendants were stuck with the police officer’s account of the interaction in…

In Commonwealth v. Gerhardt, 477 Mass. 775 (2017), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was asked to decide whether the Commonwealth may introduce evidence of a defendant’s performance on standardized field sobriety tests (FSTs) in a case in which the defendant is charged with driving under the influence of marijuana. The Court held that to the…

In a recent case, Commonwealth v. Pon (No. SJC-11542), the Supreme Judicial Court announced a new lowerstandard for sealing anindividual’s criminal record (“CORI”) with respect to a charge that was dismissed. Under the statute, G.L. c 276, §100C, a former criminal defendant was entitled to have the record of a criminal charge that resulted in…

Lawyers Weekly has reported that, in a products liability case brought in Massachusetts federal court by an insurance company on behalf of its insured against the manufacturer of a leaky water heater, a judge ruled that the disposal (“spoliation”) of the water heater before the manufacturer had an opportunity to test it did not call…

In Anderson et al. v. American International Group, Inc. et al., a Superior Court judge found the insurance company AIG liable for treble damages and attorney’s fees under chapters 93A and 176D after it refused to settle a case in which the liability of its insured, the driver of a shuttle bus, was clear. The…

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (S.J.C.) reversed a district court judge’s order suppressing the stop of a motor vehicle by police in the caseComm. v. Rohena. The district court judge had ruled that the police did not have “reasonable suspicion” to stop the car, because a 911 caller had identified a black car of a…

An article in the January 13, 2014 edition of Mass. Lawyer’s Weekly highlights the growing acceptance by courts that emails can be given the same weight as letters or other documents when it comes to contract enforcement. For example, an email might be sufficient to bind a party to an unsigned purchase and sale agreement…