Commonwealth v. Denton
Annotate this CaseThe trial judge erred by permitting the Commonwealth to respond to Defendant’s affirmative defense of entrapment by introducing evidence of three prior convictions despite Defendant’s objection that they were too stale to be probative of his predisposition to commit the crime. The Supreme Judicial Court reversed Defendant’s conviction for distribution of heroin, holding (1) under the circumstances of this case, the trial judge erred in admitting Defendant’s prior bad acts underlying the three prior convictions where the acts all took place at least nineteen years before the crime charged in this case; and (2) the error was not harmless.
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