Commonwealth v. Plouffe

Found guilty of several sexual offenses after a bench trial,1 the defendant appeals claiming that he was entitled to a required finding of not guilty, his counsel was ineffective, and there were numerous errors in the admission of evidence, including stale “fresh complaint” evidence. We affirm his convictions.

1. Sufficiency of evidence. The substance of the victim’s testimony at trial in 1998 — she was then fourteen — was that her family was a neighbor of the Plouffes, the children of each family played together, and, beginning when she was six or seven, in 1990, she and the defendant, then…