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39 Mass. App. Ct. 212

Commonwealth v. Sim

Massachusetts Appeals Court

Decided August 31, 1995

Massachusetts Appeals Court · decided 1995-08-31

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“it should go without saying that the interpreter should be competent.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including 93 Mass. App. Ct. 95 - Commonwealth v. Lujan

Relies on Commonwealth v. Soares · Cecil v. United States · Commonwealth v. Ambers

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1995-08-31

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently April 2018

2 district · 11 state decisions

60199520002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Brown, J.

¶1(concurring). When the chaff is separated from the wheat, the conclusion is inescapable that the defendant was a joint venturer. He “encourage [d] commission of a crime while sharing with the principal [s] the mental state re*224quired for the crime.” Commonwealth v. Soares, 377 Mass. 461, 470, cert, denied, 444 U.S. 881 (1979). He also agreed to share in the proceeds. Once it is determined (as we do here) that the defendant is a joint venturer, he becomes culpable for the misdeeds that followed “naturally and probably from the carrying out of the joint enterprise.” Commonwealth v. Ambers, 370 Mass. 835, 839 (1976).

¶2What concerns me most is the manner in which the police investigators dealt with the defendant’s apparent difficulty in understanding English. Of course, an interpreter is called for in such situations, but it should go without saying that the interpreter should be competent. There is no excuse for not having available at the outset a Miranda card in the relevant language. Here, the failure not to utilize a Miranda warning card in Cambodian in the Lynn area is incomprehensible.

¶3Lastly, the majority does well to cite the recent report of the Commission to Study Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts, created by our Supreme Judicial Court, entitled, “Equal Justice” (1994), for the edification of the public at large, as well as judges and attorneys. This is one study that should not be placed on the bookshelf next to the canons of ethics to gather dust together.

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