Commonwealth v. Caswell

To paraphrase some of the language of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter from Birmingham City Jail,1 courts are thermostats, not thermometers. This is certainly an apt description of our role in the realm of *480closing argument.2 From the admonition in Commonwealth v. Redmond, 370 Mass. 591, 597 (1976), to the stem warnings in Commonwealth v. Burnett, 371 Mass. 13, 19 (1976), Commonwealth v. Haas, 373 Mass. 545, 557 & n.11 (1977), and Commonwealth v. Smith, 387 Mass. 900, 903-912 (1983), to the more recent case of Commonwealth v. Beaudry, 445 Mass. 577, 579-586 (2005), and…