Commonwealth v. Cadwell

The jury verdict of guilty in this case must be taken to establish that the defendant Cadwell, living in his house in Pittsfield with Mrs. Judith Gerwaski and her two children, inflicted injuries on the child Walter which caused his death. Walter, aged four, was a frail boy, weighing about twenty-five pounds, a slow learner, not yet fully toilet trained. The jury could believe that the defendant, vexed by *310the child’s ineptitude, pursued over a period of some weeks a course of slapping and punching him, striking him with a paddle, and abusing him in other ways so that he was bruised over a…