Commonwealth v. Lopez

We transferred this case to this court on our own motion. We consider in this case, and in Commonwealth v. Grant, post 667 (1998), the standards that should govern a judge’s consideration of a defendant’s motion to withdraw a guilty plea under Mass. R. Crim. P. 30 (b), 378 Mass. 900 (1979), when the motion is filed in a sentencing enhancement context and no record of the plea exists because the means of creating that record have been destroyed pursuant to court rule. We conclude that a judge in the Superior Court acted properly when he denied four separate motions by the defendant to withdraw…