Letters v. Commonwealth

At issue on each of these petitions for writs of error is whether the petitioners’ pleas of guilty were coerced. The single justice reserved and reported each case without decision. The facts are set out in his findings.

The petitioner Letters, then an eighteen year old high school junior, pleaded guilty on December 19, 1960, to two indictments for being an accessory before the fact of rape and to a third indictment for conspiracy to rape. On December 20,1960, he was sentenced on each of the two accessory indictments to concurrent terms of from fifteen to twenty years at the Massachusetts…