Charges: Rape (3 counts)
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The Situation: Our client was a 22-year-old Hispanic man working as a laborer when he was indicted on three counts of rape following a complaint by a young woman he had met through social media. The complainant, who was 16 at the time, alleged that our client had brought her to his home and sexually assaulted her. From the moment he was arraigned, our client's life was effectively placed on hold.

The prosecutor moved to hold him without bail, and we fought for and obtained his release on GPS home confinement, a condition that remained in place for nearly three years while the case worked its way through the Superior Court. During that time, we obtained court permission for him to work outside the home, fighting to preserve at least that much of a normal life for a young man who had not been convicted of anything. He worked, he waited, and he trusted that the truth would come out at trial.

The stakes could not have been higher. A conviction on any one of the three counts would have carried a potential sentence of up to 20 years in state prison, along with mandatory sex offender registration and consequences that would have followed him for the rest of his life.

The Legal Challenge: This was a four-day Superior Court jury trial with no defense witnesses. Every element of our case was built through cross-examination. The defense had four witnesses to work with: the complainant herself, the friend she told first after the alleged incident, the detective who investigated the case, and a specially trained sexual assault nurse who examined the complainant and testified for the prosecution. Each presented a different challenge, and each required a different approach.

Cross-examination of the complainant exposed meaningful inconsistencies in her account. Her story had shifted in important ways between her initial disclosure to her friend, her statements to police, and her testimony at trial. We documented each of those shifts and put them before the jury. The first complaint witness, the friend, had heard a version of events that did not fully match what the complainant was now saying under oath. We used that testimony carefully.

The sexual assault nurse testified about physical findings from her examination. Cross-examination of a sexual assault nurse witness requires specific preparation, and we challenged her testimony on the significance and interpretation of the findings she presented. Physical findings that are consistent with assault are often also consistent with other explanations, and we made sure the jury understood that distinction.

One count was resolved before the verdict, when the complainant changed her story in a way that required the prosecution to dismiss that charge.

The remaining two counts went to the jury.

The Result: The jury returned verdicts of not guilty on both remaining counts. Our client was acquitted of all three rape charges.

He went home.

Charges: Rape of a Child with Force (two counts); Indecent Assault and Battery on a Child Under14; Intimidation of a Witness

The Situation: Our client was a man in his forties with a blended family, children of his own, and a stepdaughter from his wife's prior relationship. Years after the family had separated, his stepdaughter made allegations of sexual abuse, claiming that incidents had occurred when she was approximately eleven to thirteen years old and the family lived together. The allegations were serious and detailed. They had been reported through a mandated reporter, investigated by two police departments, documented through a forensic interview at a children's advocacy center, and ultimately presented to a grand jury, which returned an indictment.

Our client was charged with two counts of rape of a child with force, indecent assault and battery on a child under fourteen, and intimidation of a witness. He faced the possibility of decades in state prison.

The Legal Challenge: Cases built on the testimony of a single complainant, recounting events alleged to have occurred years earlier, turn entirely on credibility. There are no crime scenes, no forensic evidence tying a defendant to the acts alleged. The Commonwealth's case rested on the complainant's account and the witnesses who heard her tell it over time.

Our work was to examine that account carefully and thoroughly. We cross-examined the complainant directly, working through her testimony in detail. We cross-examined her mother, who had heard the allegations both in the car on the way to the hospital and again afterward. We crossed the first complaint witness, a friend to whom the complainant had first disclosed. And we crossed the investigating detective. Across those four witnesses, we exposed inconsistencies in the account as it had developed from first disclosure through trial, and we put those inconsistencies squarely before the jury.

The Result: The jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts.

Our client was acquitted of every charge he faced.

Charge: Indecent Assault and Battery on a Person 14 or Over (G.L. c. 265, §13H)

The Situation: Our client came to the United States from Albania more than thirty years ago. He came for the same reason so many immigrants do. He raised two daughters, both born here, both American citizens. He worked. He held a steady job at a local grocery store, where he had worked for years as a maintenance worker, sweeping floors and keeping the place running.

He spoke almost no English, but his work ethic spoke clearly enough. Then came the accusation.

A customer at the store alleged that our client had followed her through the aisles and, as she was leaving, pulled her toward him and grabbed her breast. The woman reported the incident to the store manager and later to the police. Our client was charged with Indecent Assault and Battery, a felony under Massachusetts law that carries up to five years in state prison and, upon conviction, mandatory registration as a sex offender.

For our client, the stakes were even higher than that. He is a permanent resident of the United States, but not a citizen. A felony conviction of this nature would almost certainly have meant deportation, the end of the life he had built here over three decades, separation from the daughters he came here to raise.

The Legal Challenge. The case rested entirely on the complainant's account. There were no independent eyewitnesses to the alleged contact. Surveillance video from the store captured the interaction at the exit vestibule, but as the investigating detective himself acknowledged in his report, the video angle did not allow him to actually see what the complainant alleged had occurred. Our client's body blocked the view.

The defense had two tasks: to expose the limitations of the video evidence, and to test the credibility of the complainant through cross-examination. The complainant's account, while consistent in its broad outlines, contained details and characterizations that did not hold up under careful questioning. We walked the jury through the video frame by frame, showing what the camera captured and what it did not. We cross-examined the complainant directly, and we cross-examined the detective about his own conclusions. We also had to address the courtroom dynamic directly. Our client spoke no English and required an interpreter throughout. He presented as foreign, unfamiliar, and different in ways that could have worked against him if the jury was not paying careful attention to the evidence.

The Result: The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Our client did not face deportation.

He kept his freedom, life, his daughters, and the home he had spent thirty years building.

Charge: Indecent Assault and Battery on a Child Under 14 (felony)

The Situation: Our client was a man from West Africa living in Massachusetts with his family. His stepdaughter alleged that he had sexually abused her when she was a young child. The allegation was not made until years after the alleged events, and the disclosure traveled through multiple family members and contacts before police were involved.

Our client was charged with a felony count of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. The stakes were serious. A felony conviction of this nature carries a prison sentence, mandatory sex offender registration, and the weight of a permanent record. For a man living in this country who had built a life here, the consequences extended well beyond incarceration.

The Legal Challenge: During the pretrial phase, we secured some meaningful victories, including a successful motion to exclude certain characterizations of our client that the Commonwealth sought to introduce. The court also denied the prosecutor's motion to introduce alternative first-complaint testimony, a significant win that limited the potential corroboration evidence available to the prosecution.

At trial, this was a case built entirely on the testimony of the complainant and the witnesses who heard her account develop over time. There were no independent physical findings to corroborate the allegations. Cross-examination of the complainant exposed inconsistencies and logical gaps in the delayed-disclosure account. The story had changed in meaningful ways as it passed from person to person.

Closing argument had to do two things at once: dismantle the evidentiary case on its merits, and ask the jury explicitly to hold themselves accountable for the difference between what they didn't recognize and what the evidence actually proved. The family's background, the structure of the household, and the way the disclosure traveled were all unfamiliar to a New England jury. The closing asked the jury directly to distinguish between what was culturally different and what was actually evidence of guilt.

The Result: The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Our client was acquitted of the felony sexual abuse charge.

He was able to return to his life, his community, and his family.

Charges: Strangulation or Suffocation (felony); Assault and Battery on a Family or Household Member (misdemeanor)

The Situation: Our client was a young woman in the hardest stretch of her life. She had given birth five months earlier, and the transition to motherhood had not gone smoothly. She is autistic, and she was struggling with postpartum depression, a combination that can make the ordinary overwhelm of a newborn feel genuinely unbearable.

,One evening she and her husband argued, and she left the house. Worried, he called the police. When officers located her and spoke with her husband, he described a physical altercation. She was arrested. The charges that followed, including a felony strangulation count, were serious. At arraignment, the court conducted a dangerousness hearing and ordered our client to stay away from her husband and from her five-month-old son. She could not go home. She could not hold her baby. Her autism made her circumstances worse, as she struggled to cope with such drastic and sudden changes.

The Legal Challenge: The immediate problem was the stay-away order. Every day it remained in place was a day our client was separated from an infant who needed her, and a day she was cut off from the home and support system she needed to stabilize.

The goal was not just to defend the charges but to move fast enough to matter. We obtained a psychiatric evaluation and assembled a treatment plan tailored to her autism diagnosis and postpartum depression, one that addressed the actual conditions driving the crisis rather than simply managing the legal exposure. We presented that plan to her husband and to the prosecution. Her husband, satisfied that she was getting what she needed, no longer sought to keep her away. The prosecution agreed the treatment and the plan we had set up were sufficient to guarantee everyone's safety. The charges were dismissed by thegovernment. From arraignment to dismissal, the case was resolved in forty days.

The Result: Both charges, including the felony strangulation count, were dismissed.

Our client went home to her husband and their infant son.

Charge: Assault and Battery on a Family/Household Member (G.L. c.265, §13M(a))

The Situation: Our client and the mother of his young daughter had been in an on-again, off-again relationship for several years. By early 2023, that relationship had deteriorated into a serious and contentious dispute over custody of their three-year-old child.

In late January 2023, while spending time together at a hotel, the complainant alleged that our client had physically assaulted her. She was hospitalized that same evening after losing consciousness, and the cause documented by hospital staff was acute alcohol intoxication. What made this case particularly difficult was not only the charge itself but the atmosphere surrounding it. The complainant had also accused our client of sexual assault dating back years, including the allegation that he had secretly recorded a sexual assault while she was unconscious. Those allegations were never charged by the prosecutor. But they hovered over everything, and our client faced not only a criminal case but a simultaneous effort to strip him of custody of his daughter.

Just days after a family court gave him temporary physical custody of the child, the complainant sought and obtained an emergency restraining order.

The Legal Challenge: The defense had to accomplish several things at once. We had to establish that the complainant's hospitalization was caused by her own extreme intoxication, not by anything our client had done. We had to demonstrate her motive to fabricate or exaggerate, a custody dispute as high-stakes as they come. And we had to account for the uncharged accusations that the prosecution would inevitably use to color the jury's perception of our client.

A prior civil hearing in a different court on the restraining order had produced testimony from the complainant under oath. We obtained that transcript and used it at trial to cross-examine her. Her testimony at the criminal trial was inconsistent with what she had said at the civil hearing. We demonstrated those inconsistencies on cross-examination and put them before the jury. The intoxication was documented in the hospital records. The custody dispute was amatter of court record. We laid it all out.

The Result: The jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Our client went home to his daughter, and they were allowed to continue their life together.

Charges: Strangulation or Suffocation (felony); Indecent Assault and Battery on a Person 14 or Over (felony); Assault and Battery with a Dangerous Weapon (felony); Intimidation of a Witness (felony)

The Situation: Our client was a man in his thirties with a long and documented history of depression, PTSD, and polysubstance abuse, conditions that had never been adequately treated and that had shaped nearly every difficult chapter of his adult life.

On the night in question, he was in a severe crisis. A chaotic series of events unfolded, and by the time it was over, he faced four felony charges, including strangulation and indecent assault and battery. What made the case especially frightening for our client was the range of consequences he was facing. A conviction on any of the felony counts would have followed him for the rest of his life.

The Legal Challenge: The legal work here was not primarily about contesting the facts. It was about context. Our client needed to be understood as someone in a mental health and substance abuse crisis, not simply a person who had committed violent crimes. That required building the full picture and presenting it clearly to the prosecution and the court: the depression, the PTSD, the pattern of self-medication, and what meaningful accountability actually looked like for someone in his situation.

We got him evaluated and connected to treatment for both his mental health and his substance use. We then showed the prosecution and the court who our client actually was, not the person described in the police report, but the person behind that night, and what he was doing to address the conditions that had brought him there. The case moved toward a resolution that reflected his circumstances and his genuine effort to get better, rather than simply what the charging documents said he had done.

The Result: The two most serious felony charges, strangulation and indecent assault and battery, were dismissed outright. The remaining two felonies, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and witness intimidation, were continued without a finding. This meant that there were no guilty findings, no convictions on his record. Our client now has a clean record. He was placed on probation and paid restitution.

The resolution gave him a path forward rather than a permanent record that would have defined and limited the rest of his life.

Perhaps most importantly, the mental health and substance abuse treatment we connected him with has been life-changing.

Charges
‍Assault and Battery on a Police Officer; Attempt to Disarm a Police Officer (felony); Resisting Arrest; Disorderly Conduct; Disturbing the Peace

The Situation
Our client was a young man who had struggled for years with serious and documented neurological and mental health conditions. On the night in question, he was in crisis. Officers responded to a disturbance call and encountered him in a severely altered state. The confrontation escalated. By the time it was over, he faced five charges, including a felony count of attempting to disarm a police officer. An attempt to disarm a police officer is a serious felony in Massachusetts. A conviction carries significant prison exposure and a permanent felony record. For our client, that outcome would have been devastating, not merely as a matter of consequences, but because it would have foreclosed the treatment, stability, and future he was genuinely capable of building.

The Legal Challenge
Our most important job in a case like this is to be sure that the court and the prosecution understand our client as a whole person, not as a set of charges. That meant doing the hard work before any courtroom advocacy could succeed: understanding his severe and unusual neurologic disorder, getting our client properly evaluated, connecting him with appropriate treatment providers, and building a comprehensive picture of who he was, what had led to this night, and what meaningful accountability actually looked like for someone in his circumstances.

We demonstrated to the prosecution and the judge the medical and psychological history in detail. We educated them about the specific conditions involved, conditions that were not widely understood and that required explanation if the court was going to make a fully informed decision. We demonstrated that our client was engaged with treatment, that he was making genuine progress, and that the resolution we were seeking served the interests of public safety as well as his own.

Ultimately, we were able to get the prosecution and the judge to agree that incarceration was not the right answer in this case.

The Result
The felony charge was resolved without a conviction. Our client was not incarcerated. He was placed on probation with conditions tied to his ongoing treatment, a resolution that gave him a genuine path forward in his young life.

Charges
Operating Under the Influence of Liquor, Second Offense; Negligent Operation of a Motor Vehicle

The Situation
Our client was found asleep in the driver's seat, his car running, in the drive-through window of a Taco Bell late at night. POlice officders who came to the scene who believed he was operating under the influence of alcohol. He was a professional with no prior serious criminal history, and a second OUI conviction would have carried significant consequences for his license, his livelihood, and his record. He maintained that he had not been impaired.

The Legal Challenge
Obviously, we were up against a challenge given how our client was found. The case turned on a piece of evidence the prosecutors had not anticipated would be a problem: police body camera footage recorded at the scene. Officers documented their observations of our client in their reports. The reports described the standard indicators of impairment: unsteady gait, slurred speech, bloodshot eyes, the odor of alcohol. At trial, we played the body camera footage for the jury. What the camera showed was different from what the reports described.

The jury could see, moment by moment, the gap between what the police reported and what the police camera recorded. When what the police say happened is directly contradicted by what the police camera recorded, that is a powerful tool for the defense. The jury saw the discrepancy.

The Result
The jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Charges
Operating Under the Influence of Liquor (.08% or greater); Resisting Arrest

The Situation
Our client was a Haitian-born healthcare worker in his early fifties who spent his days caring for dementia and disabled patients. He was a man who showed up for the most vulnerable people in his community, day after day, doing work that most people never see. Not long before his arrest, he had been injured on the job. He was still recovering.

Late one night, he pulled into a gas station to fill his tank. He had no idea that other drivers had called in complaints about a vehicle matching his. As far as he knew, he had pulled over to get gas and was standing at the pump. When a state trooper pulled up with blue lights, our client had no warning, no context, and no understanding of what was happening. The trooper observed what he believed were signs of impairment and administered field sobriety tests. Our client, still processing the situation and not fully clear on what was being asked of him, struggled with the instructions. When the trooper moved to place him under arrest and grabbed his arm, it was the arm that had been injured on the job. The pain of that contact caused him to pull away reflexively. That involuntary reaction became the basis for the Resisting Arrest charge.

The stakes of this case could not have been higher. A conviction would have threatened not only his freedom, but his ability to remain in this country.

The Legal Challenge
This case went to trial before a jury, and it hinged almost entirely on credibility of the police officers. The Commonwealth’s case rested on the trooper’s account of the stop, the field sobriety tests, and the alleged resistance. Our work was to take that account apart, piece by piece, using the trooper’s own body camera footage. The footage did not support the narrative the Commonwealth intended to tell. Through careful cross-examination using the video, we were able to challenge the trooper’s characterization of our client’s demeanor, his appearance, and his performance on the field tests. What the trooper described as signs of impairment looked very different when the jury could see for themselves. On the Resist Arrest charge, the defense told the jury what actually happened: a man in pain, grabbed on an already-injured arm, pulled back. Not a choice. Not a fight. A reflex. We obtained and introduced medical records documenting the prior workplace injury,giving the jury a factual foundation for understanding why our client reacted the way he did.

The Result
The jury returned not guilty verdicts on both charges.

Our client walked out of that courtroom free. His ability to continue his life, his work, and his presence in this country remained intact.

Charges
‍Operating Under the Influence of Liquor, 2nd Offense; Operating with a Suspended License; Lights Violation

The Situation
Our client was a young man working in the restaurant industry who had gone out for the evening with a group of friends. He was the one who had put the tab on his card, and his friends had sent him their shares through Venmo. When police stopped him just after 1 a.m. for driving without taillights and detected the odor of alcohol, they found a bar receipt in his pocket totaling nearly $200, all for alcoholic beverages.

The prosecution’s theory was straightforward: here was a man who had consumed an enormous amount of alcohol and then gotten behind the wheel. The receipt, they argued, told the story. What the receipt actually showed was a group of people having a night out together. Our client had covered the bill. He had then driven his friends home because they had been drinking. He had a prior OUI, which meant this charge carried significantly greater consequences than a first offense. His license was also suspended at the time of the stop, which he did not contest.

The OUI second offense charge was what mattered, and it was the charge we went to trial to fight.

The Legal Challenge
The case rested heavily on the officers' observations and the field sobriety tests. Before trial, we successfully moved to exclude two key pieces: our client’s refusal to answer some initial questions, and his refusal to complete the walk-and-turn test. Keeping those refusals from the jury was essential. A jury hearing that a defendant refused to answer police questions and refused to perfom one of the field sobriety tests can draw conclusions that have nothing to do with the actual evidence. What remained for the jury was the officer’s account of the stop, the one-leg stand, and the bar receipt.

Through cross-examination of the officers, we drew out everything they had not said in their reports and everything they had observed that pointed to our client's lack of intoxication. When stopped, our client had pulled over immediately and cooperated. His driving, apart from the tail light issue that initiated the stop, had been normal. The things the officers did not observe were just as important as the things they did, and we made sure the jury understood that. For the receipt, we called one of his friends to testify. She explained how the evening had actually gone: the group, the shared tab, the Venmo payments. The narrative the prosecution had built around that piece of paper collapsed once a witness who was there told the jury what it actually represented.

The Result
The jury found our client not guilty on the OUI second offense charge, and not responsible on the lights violation. He was found guilty on the suspended license charge, which he had never disputed. The charge that mattered, the one that could have cost him his freedom and his future, was defeated at trial.

Charges
Conspiracy to Violate the Drug Laws (misdemeanor); Distribution of a Class B Substance (felony); Distribution of a Class A Substance (felony)

The Situation
Our client was a young woman who had made the mistake of trusting the wrong person. Her ex-boyfriend was a drug dealer, and he coerced her into helping him. She was swept up in a wiretap investigation, indicted in Superior Court, and ultimately convicted after a jury trial on the conspiracy count. The two felony distribution charges were continued without a finding for two years, with probation conditions. She completed probation successfully and was discharged.

What followed were years of consequences she had not fully anticipated. She was a single mother of two children, working hard to build a stable life. But her criminal record shadowed everything. A job offer was rescinded after a background check. She could not volunteer at her children's school, accompany them on field trips, or read to her daughter's classroom. She moved five times in six years, unable to secure housing, and was living with her parents when she came to us. She held a senior position at a healthcare company and was performing well, but advancement was blocked. She had rebuilt herself in every meaningful way. Her criminal record did not reflect her.
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The Legal Challenge
The case presented two distinct record sealing problems. The misdemeanor conspiracy conviction was eligible for administrative sealing through the Probation Service, as the three-year waiting period had run and she had no subsequent criminal involvement. That piece was straightforward. The felony charges were a different matter. Administratively, felony convictions require seven years from the end of probation before they can be sealed. But these were not convictions. They had been disposed of by continuance without a finding in Superior Court, and then dismissed after probation was successfully completed.

In the ordinary course, a CWOF in District Court is sealable immediately upon dismissal under G.L. c. 276, Section 100C. The question was whether the same logic applied to a CWOF entered in Superior Court, which has no statutory CWOF mechanism and where the disposition had been entered under the court's inherent authority as recognized in a case called Commonwealth v. Powell. The Court initially denied the sealing petition on the felony charges, citing the seven-year waiting period. We took the position that the Judge had it wrong: these were non-convictions, not convictions, and the court retained authority to seal them directly under Section 100C without any waiting period. The judge was not certain about the court's authority under these circumstances and requested a full brief on the issue.

We argued that a Superior Court CWOF entered pursuant to Powell is the functional equivalent of a statutory CWOF in the District Court, that Powell specifically contemplated dismissal upon successful completion of probation, and that Section 100C authorizes a court to seal dismissed charges when substantial justice requires it. The Probation Service's earlier denial did not control, because the administrative pathway and the judicial pathway are separate. The court had independent authority to act on the petition. The judge agreed.

The Result
The court entered an order sealing all felony charges. The misdemeanor conviction was sealed administratively. Our client's record is clean.

Charges
‍Bomb/HijackThreat (felony); Threat to Commit Crime (misdemeanor)

The Situation
Our client was 37 years old, a real estate broker and father of three, when a cascade of resurfaced trauma sent him into a severe mental health crisis. Over a period of days, he posted threatening messages on social media directed at a local elected official who he says sexually abused him as a child. The posts referenced weapons and explosives. The FBI was notified of the posts, and investigated. Thye were able to tie the posts to our client.

A SWAT team responded to our client's home. He was arrested, indicted, and held in custody for 127 days before being released on house arrest pending trial. The threats were serious enough on their face to warrant the response they received. But they were the expression of a man in crisis who had run out of other ways to be heard. The man he had threatened was a well-connected politician. He was also the man who, more than twenty years before, had sexually abused and exploited our client. Our client had carried that abuse and its effects for more than two decades. A series of circumstances brought his trauma to a head, which triggered him to make the posts.

The Legal Challenge
The case was indicted and sent to Superior Court, and assigned to the most complex DCM track. It was a serious felony prosecution with real prison exposure. Our client had been incarcerated for over four months before arraignment in Superior Court, when we got him released on house arrest with GPS monitoring. But there was a real prospect of a significant prison sentence. The work of the defense was to build a complete picture of who our client was and why this happened. That meant documenting the childhood abuse allegations, his mental health history, the specific trauma trigger that preceded the posts, and, critically, the fact that he did not possess weapons or explosives and had no genuine intent or capacity to carry out the threats. It also meant engaging with prosecutors constructively: presenting a client who had fully accepted responsibility, had embraced mental health and substance abuse treatment, and posed no danger. The sentencing presentation addressed the abuse allegations directly. We helped our client bring his allegations to the district attorney's office in the county where the alleged abuser resided. In our case, we framed the prosecution in its full human context.

We helped our client get the mental health treatment he needed, and put together a plan going forward that he would follow to maintain his mental health.

The Result
Our client pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served, the 127 days he had already spent incarcerated, with three years of probation. No additional incarceration. No more house arrest. He left the courthouse that day with hope for his future.

Charges
Malicious Damage to a Motor Vehicle (felony, multiple counts); Malicious Destruction of Property (misdemeanor, multiple counts); Negligent Operation of a Motor Vehicle; Minor in Possession of Alcohol; Open Container; Carrying a Firearm on School Grounds

The Situation

Our client was 18 years old when he and a co-defendant drove through two communities in the early morning hours, firing an air pellet gun from a moving vehicle. By the time police caught up with them, they had shattered windows on 46 parked cars and damaged 8 businesses. Officers pursued the vehicle, made the stop, and recovered the pellet gun. Total damage to victims exceeded $15,000.The case generated enormous community attention, local news coverage, and over 60 criminal counts spread across multiple dockets, with more than 55 individual victims, each requiring restitution documentation.

What the charging documents didn't capture was who our client actually was. He had been adopted as a young child from an orphanage in the far north of Russia, where he had survived neglect, hunger, and serious early trauma. He came to the United States with his younger brother, was diagnosed with PTSD as a child, and had spent years in therapy working to overcome those early experiences. At the time of the offense, he was enrolled in a skilled trades apprenticeship program and showing real promise, a young man who had had a genuinely terrible start to life and was, for the first time, finding his footing.

The Legal Challenge
The central legal problem were the felony charges. Malicious Damage to a Motor Vehicle is a felony under Massachusetts law and cannot be continued without a finding. That meant that without charge reduction, our client faced mandatory felony convictions on dozens of counts at age 18, before his adult life had really begun. Our work was to persuade the prosecutor to reduce those felony counts to the misdemeanor equivalent, Malicious Destruction of Property, so that a CWOF disposition could be made available. That required building a complete picture of our client's background, his mental health history, his current trajectory, and the meaningful distinction between who he was on the night in question and who he was becoming.

The Result
All felony charges were either reduced to misdemeanor level or continued without a finding. Our client received no felony convictions. He was placed on probation and paid full restitution to all victims, every one of whom was made whole on the day of sentencing. He was able to move ahead with his life and put his really bad decision behind him, and it would not burden his future.