Attorney Wood recently testified as an expert witness on the effective assistance of counsel. in a pretrial evidentiary hearing in a Norfolk County felony case. A superior court judge found him qualified to explain the constitutional and ethical obligations of a criminal defense lawyer generally, the elements of effective representation, and to offer an opinion on the effectiveness of the defendant's prior attorney in permitting his client to submit to a police interrogation.
Amicus Brief: Racist Pretextual Stops and Distracted Driving Law
Attorney Wood was proud to be part of a team arguing that the Supreme Judicial Court should abandon its cases allowing for pretextual stops and restricting how defendants can prove that a particular stop was racially discriminatory. The amicus brief goes on to point out that the Commonwealth’s new “Distracted Driving” hands-free law limits data collection on stops by individual officers, making it essentially impossible to ever prove a claim of discrimination. The Court should replace the current test with a test that asks whether a driver would have normally been stopped for the violation without a pretext. If not, then the prosecution has the burden to prove that the stop was not discriminatory. This amazing team was made up of Oren Nimni for the Lawyers for Committee for Civil Rights, Katharine Naples-Mitchell for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, Chauncey Wood for the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Radha Natarajan for the New England Innocence Project.