Commonwealth v. Beauchamp

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s, most famous *592maxim — “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience”1 — cannot, of course, be taken literally. Law without logic — in the most fundamental sense of objective, practical, and consistent analysis and reasoning — will be law in a vacuum, formless and insubstantial.2 Twice-convicted (of second degree murder) defendant Robert C. Beauchamp has presented us with an intricately woven yet diaphanous fabric of contentions — primarily that the Commonwealth’s use in his second trial of his testimony from his first trial violated his…