Massachusetts Judge’s Calls Keep Going Aaron Hernandez’s Way

Massachusetts is where a chief justice of the state’s supreme court attended the founding meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. It’s where five judges on that Supreme Judicial Court found a right to gay marriage in the oldest operating constitution in the world that mentions neither “gay” nor “marriage” anywhere but “God” more than a half-dozen times in its first few paragraphs. It’s the state where Boston-born US District Judge for Massachusetts Mark Wolf (Harvard Law, ’71) ruled that a man imprisoned for murdering his wife possessed the right to gender-reassignment surgery on the taxpayer’s dime.

And it’s the state where E. Susan Garsh received, at Harvard Law, her JD. 

Garsh ruled on Friday that the prosecution in the Aaron Hernandez murder trial cannot submit Odin Lloyd’s last words to his family that may have allowed a dead man to identify his murderer from the grave. “U saw who I’m with,” he messaged his mother. “NFL,” he texted his sister at 3:22 a.m. “Just so you know.” The texts stop because a minute later someone stopped Odin Lloyd.

The judge ruled that the prosecution cannot raise Hernandez’s alleged shooting of friend Alexander Bradley in the eye, which would indicate a pattern of the Patriots player attempting to eliminate friends who knew details of a 2012 double-homicide that a grand jury has charged Hernandez with committing. 

And speaking of that double-homicide, that’s not to be discussed with the jury in the Lloyd case, either. 

The judge had earlier this fall excluded evidence retrieved from phones and iPads in Hernandez’s home and .45 caliber bullets discovered in his home and car. Like the .45 caliber bullets, the judge excluded from evidence on Friday a picture showing Hernandez posing in a selfie with a .45 caliber gun.   

Some have claimed Garsh did the prosecution a favor by removing grounds for an appeal. She also may have removed grounds for a conviction. The prosecution anticipated her airbrushing ugliness out of the Aaron Hernandez picture. This summer, they petitioned for her removal. But the judge that has excluded so much from the trial uncharacteristically rebuffed this one request for exclusion. 

Hernandez should thank Bill Belichick. If the Dallas Cowboys, Jacksonville Jaguars, or Indianapolis Colts had drafted the University of Florida product instead of the New England Patriots, Hernandez would be facing a trial including the bullets, the texts, and probably much else that hurts his case. But since New England’s football dictator drafted Hernandez to play in the state that let murderer Willie Horton free to rape in Maryland, the defendant in the Odin Lloyd murder trial stands a not insignificant chance of walking.