Twenty years ago, the Supreme Judicial Court decided Commonwealth v. Adjutant, holding that a defendant can offer evidence of an alleged victim’s violent reputation and conduct to prove that the victim, rather than the defendant, was the first aggressor. This holding is one of a few limited exceptions to the general rule barring propensity evidence, or evidence of a person’s character trait to prove that they acted in accordance with that trait. The court in Adjutant decided that evidence reflecting a victim’s propensity for violence, whether or not the defendant knew about that propensity, would help the jury “make an informed decision about the identity of the initial aggressor.”
Andrade concerns a domestic dispute between a father and son. At trial, the court did not allow the defendant—the son—to introduce evidence that about one year after the charged incident, the father assaulted his wife. On appeal, Andrade presents a narrow, but new, question to the court: does the holding in Adjutant that a defendant can introduce evidence of a victim’s violent acts include conduct that happened after the charged incident?
Where character evidence or evidence of a defendant’s bad acts are admissible, there is no bar on admitting evidence that postdates the charged incident. Though evidence of a defendant’s bad actions cannot be used to prove character the way a victim’s can be, Massachusetts courts have regularly allowed evidence of a defendant’s later actions to prove other purposes, like motive, bias, or identity. The SJC has also, at least once, directly said that character evidence postdating charged conduct can be admissible when addressing an early case about a defendant’s reputation. Other courts that have addressed the question of whether a victim’s violent acts that post-date the charged conduct can be used a first aggressor evidence have agreed that the victim’s subsequent conduct at least has the possibility of being probative, and should not be barred entirely. That is because courts have generally agreed that evidence of a person’s character after a point in time is just as useful to prove how a person might have acted before that point; the reasoning is that if we are inferring a person’s actions from who they are, there’s no reason to assume in all cases that inference doesn’t work just as well looking backwards as forwards.
In Adjutant, the SJC noted that criminal cases should tend toward admitting exculpatory evidence, and that juries are capable of hearing evidence themselves and deciding how much weight to assign it in their decision-making. The court should hold to this principle, as well as the general rules of evidence that allow admitting evidence of later conduct in other contexts, and hold that a defendant can introduce evidence of later acts of violence to show that an alleged victim was the first aggressor.
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