Connolly v. Commonwealth

By petition for writ of error, lodged in the Supreme Judicial Court for the county of Suffolk, Daniel Connolly has alleged that the judge’s instructions to the jury at his 1968 trial for murder placed on him, illegally, the burden of proving that he acted in self-defense (exception was not taken at the trial; this was before the development of the constitutional law on the subject). By agreement with the Commonwealth, the record on the petition consists essentially of the transcript of the trial as it reached this court on the petitioner’s unsuccessful appeal from his conviction of murder in…