Judge was right to bar prosecutor, SJC says
A Superior Court judge was right to order a Hampden County prosecutor off a murder case he was overseeing because the defendant allegedly tried to hire a hit man to kill him, the state’s highest court ruled Thursday.
In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court said Hampden Assistant District Attorney David Green could not be involved in the prosecution because he is a potential witness in the upcoming first-degree murder trial of Blake J. Scanlon, who is accused of killing his girlfriend, Alexis Avery, in their Westfield home in 2019.
According to the ruling, Green repeatedly advocated for a jailhouse informant who claimed Scanlon tried to hire him to kill Green in 2020, pushing for shorter sentences in another jurisdiction and seeking less onerous bail conditions in other pending cases.
His efforts to help the informant, who had agreed to testify against Scanlon, was a mistake, the court ruled. The decision said Superior Court Judge Jane E. Mulqueen was right to conclude that Scanlon should have the opportunity to call Green as a witness during his murder trial, meaning Green could not be involved in prosecuting the case.
“Disqualification of counsel is not a measure to be taken lightly [but] ...these actions are what makes Green a potential witness at Scanlon’s murder trial,” the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.
The SJC said that Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni’s office did not convince them that Mulqueen was violating the separation of powers spelled out in the state’s Constitution by essentially making a management decision.
“The judge’s decision does not amount to an ‘intolerable interference by the judiciary’ in the executive branch,” the court said. “This is simply a case where a judge made a discretionary decision, based on the particular circumstances of the case, to disqualify an attorney who may well be a witness at trial.”
Marissa Leigh Elkins, Scanlon’s lawyer, applauded the decision.
“I was glad to see that …. [the] SJC agreed with Judge Mulqueen’s decision,” Elkins said.