SALEM — The slightly hunched 71-year-old in the tan Members Only-style jacket hardly looks famous.
And back in the day, when he ran with a crew of North Shore wiseguys, Jimmy Blood didn't especially stand out, either.
Yet it's Blood's name that still gets tossed around courtrooms on a regular basis.
That's because in 1987, Blood and his lawyers convinced the Supreme Judicial Court that police violated his rights when they strapped a body wire to Blood's former best friend, Chuckie Hudson, to secretly record them planning a gold heist in Lynn.
Ever since the SJC overturned Blood's conviction on conspiracy charges, his case has been cited as the legal precedent requiring police in Massachusetts to get a warrant before using an informant to record conversations. They're now known as Blood warrants.
Blood chuckled when asked recently whether he thinks of himself as famous.
"Infamous," he said.
Blood is one of a handful of North Shore natives whose cases may not be as famous as that of Ernesto Miranda, the Arizona man whose case led to the requirement that police read people their rights when arresting them, but whose names are almost as familiar to lawyers and judges, some of them far from the North Shore.
U.S. vs. Turkette
In the 1970s, Novia Turkette Jr. of Peabody ran a gang that specialized in burglaries, fencing stolen goods and, later, arson for hire and drugs. He was indicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Turkette's lawyers essentially argued that the gang could not be considered an "enterprise" as envisioned by the law because the activities they were engaged in were illegal. They also argued that the law was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court, in 1981, disagreed, and in the process more clearly defined the law in U.S. vs. Turkette, so that it is now used regularly to prosecute not only illegal gangs but corporate executives.
Turkette did his federal time and was released, only to get caught in two more burglaries. He's now serving an eight-year sentence for masterminding a failed burglary at a Georgetown liquor store in 2002.
Blood warrants
While the Turkette case was winding its way through the courts, Chuckie Hudson, who had run in the same circles as Turkette, had his own arson case to worry about.
Eager to make a deal, he told state police that Turkette, who was free on bail in the RICO case, was planning a $3 million gold heist at a smelting plant in Lynn, and that among the participants was a Lynn police sergeant, Ernest Lorenzen.
Investigators sent Hudson, wearing a wire, to a meeting at Turkette's Peabody home, where the burglary was discussed. Blood was also at that meeting.
When they showed up at the smelting plant, they were greeted by state police.
"Everybody copped out except for myself and Ernie Lorenzen," said Blood, who refused a plea bargain. Blood, represented by an up-and-coming public defender named Lawrence McGuire, insisted on a trial.
"I took it as a man," Blood said. "Two kinds of people I hate in this world, diddlers and stool pigeons."
When he and Lorenzen were convicted, he insisted on an appeal, which he eventually won, setting the legal precedent.
Lorenzen's conviction was also overturned. But, most likely only because B comes before L in the alphabet, the case came to be known as Commonwealth vs. Blood.
Few people know of Blood's role in the case these days, and that's fine with him.
"I don't associate with people who would know about it," Blood said. "It doesn't ever enter my mind. It was way in the past."
But he smiles when he considers the impact his case has had, requiring that police have a judge's permission to secretly record someone's conversation.
His lawyer, McGuire, is now in charge of the public defenders office at Salem Superior Court.
Adjutant's defense
Another, more recent case involves a North Shore woman convicted of killing a man who had hired her as an escort in 1999.
Rhonda Adjutant, a former Swampscott woman, was convicted of killing a man named Stephen Whiting after the two got into a disagreement over what services Whiting had paid her to perform.
She says Whiting came at her with a crowbar, and she stabbed him in self-defense. But during her trial, a judge barred her from introducing evidence that showed Whiting had a violent past, on the theory that Adjutant didn't know that when she stabbed him.
The Supreme Judicial Court later overturned her conviction and ruled that a victim's history of violence can be told to jurors under certain circumstances.
Her case helped Harvard graduate student Alexander Pring-Wilson win a new trial in the stabbing death of a Cambridge man.
Unfortunately for Adjutant, her freedom was brief. Within months of her release from prison, she was caught on tape in calls to her jailed boyfriend discussing a new prostitution business and a plan to have a teenager take the rap for drugs found in her boyfriend's apartment. She's back in Framingham State Prison.
The Zimmerman precedent
Michelle Zimmerman of Beverly was convicted of vehicular homicide in a crash that killed her boyfriend in Ipswich in 2003.
Zimmerman told police she was going 20 to 30 miles an hour when she skidded on ice, but the so-called "black box" under the seat of her GMC Yukon told a different story: Zimmerman was going 58 miles an hour.
Her lawyer, Robert Weiner, tried to bar the evidence at trial, comparing it to having the "government riding around with you in the back seat."
But the evidence was used, Zimmerman was convicted, and last year the conviction was upheld by the state Appeals Court, setting the precedent for prosecutors to use data from a car's computer during a trial.
It was one of just two appellate court decisions in the entire country when the ruling was made.
Zimmerman served about three months in jail before she was released after an unusual request for leniency from her victim's family, who felt it would do more good for her to lecture young drivers than to spend any more time behind bars.
