Massachusetts

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that sex offenders can't be banned from living near parks and schools, The Boston Globe's Michael Levenson reports. The court said those restrictions are like the eras in American history in which American Indians were removed from their lands and Japanese Americans were interned during World War II: "'Except for the incarceration of persons under the criminal law and the civil commitment of mentally ill or dangerous persons, the days are long since past when whole communities of persons, such as Native Americans and Japanese-Americans, may be lawfully banished from our midst,' Justice Geraldine S. Hines wrote."

Daniel M. Filler, a Drexel University law professor, told Levenson that statewide rules restricting where sex offenders can live would pass constitutional muster. However, the problem is when muncipalities pass laws that force convicted sex offenders to move to another town.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court, 5-2, has ruled that inmates serving life sentences for murders committed while they were juveniles are constitutionally entitled to be represented by lawyers and to have access to expert witnesses at their parole hearings, NECN reports. The 5-member majority said providing defendants access to lawyers and to experts would ensure they have meaningful access to argue for parole.

The court also ruled that inmates can appeal parole denials, although judges could not order that parole be granted--only order new parole hearings.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that mandatory life sentences for juveniles without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional. 

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has changed the jury instructions that should be given about eyewitness evidence, which is often more fallible than people think, the Boston Globe's Travis Andersen and Martin Finucane report. While the defendant did not get his conviction overturned, the high court has issued new instructions to be used in criminal cases going forward, including "a warning that a witness’s expressed certainty may not indicate accuracy, especially when the witness did not express the same level of certainty when first making the identification. The template also includes commentary on the complexity of recalling past events, the effect of stress on eyewitness identification, the length of time that elapsed between a crime and a person being identified, and issues associated with having a witness view a suspect multiple times during identification procedures. In addition, the instructions allow jurors to consider whether witnesses were exposed to descriptions given by others, including police officers, which 'may inflate the witness’s confidence in the identification.'"

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that cyberharassment and lies posted online encouraging that bullying is not speech protected by the First Amendment, the Boston Herald reports. The court upheld the criminal harassment convictions of two real estate developers who arranged postings online to harass two business executives they were feuding with. The postings falsely claimed the couple had golf carts free for the taking and wanted to sell their "fictitious dead son’s Harley Davidson motorcycle for $300," the Herald further reports. The husband also was sent an email from a "make-believe former teenage male employee accusing him of sexual molestation."

The speech was unprotected, the court ruled, because their conduct was a "'hybrid of conduct and speech integral to the commission of a crime ... Their conduct served solely to harass the (victims) by luring numerous strangers and prompting incessant late-night telephone calls to their home by way of false representations, by overtly and aggressively threatening to misuse their personal identifying information, and by falsely accusing (the husband) of a serious crime.'"