BOSTON, Nov. 18, 2013—The state’s highest court last week reversed a decision by a Boston Municipal Court judge who vacated a defendant’s guilty pleas more than a decade after accepting them, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

The Supreme Judicial Court On Nov. 12 vacated a 2011 order by Boston Municipal Court Judge Raymond Dougan, Jr., allowing ANGEL CARTAGENA (D.O.B. 3/21/53) to withdraw his 1996 guilty pleas to two counts of larceny over $250, two counts of uttering, and one count of receiving stolen property. The Massachusetts Appeals Court last year similarly reversed the order, but Cartagena appealed that decision to the SJC, which remanded the case for further findings by the plea judge.

Cartagena claimed that he did not understand the ramifications of his guilty plea, despite a record showing that he “waive[d] his right to a jury trial and admitted guilt willingly, knowingly, and voluntarily” and a copy of a plea tender sheet in which Dougan acknowledged that he had advised the defendant of the rights he has under law and the consequences of waiving them for purposes of a guilty plea. Cartagena filed an affidavit that no colloquy took place, but he did not provide affidavits from the attorneys who represented him at the time, who would have insisted on a proper colloquy.

In granting Cartagena’s motion to withdraw those guilty pleas, Dougan said on the record that he didn’t recall the proceedings but was not confident that he followed the law for judges who accept guilty pleas from defendants.

“I, as the judge who took this tender, am not willing to presume that I did what I was required to do,” the SJC decision quotes him as saying.

The high court rejected that line of thought, finding that court proceedings have a presumption of regularity in the absence of some specific indication that an event was somehow irregular.

“‘A judge should … not accept a plea unless satisfied that the plea is voluntary and that the defendant understands the nature of the charges,’” the court wrote, quoting a 1993 SJC decision. “When a guilty plea is challenged, it is ordinarily the Commonwealth’s burden to demonstrate that a plea was knowingly and voluntarily made … But where, as here, a contemporaneous record of the plea proceedings no longer exists due to the passage of time, and it is impossible or impractical to reconstruct the record, the defendant is required to ‘present some articulable reason which the motion judge deems a credible indicator that the presumptively proper guilty plea proceedings were constitutionally defective.’”

Assistant District Attorney Zachary Hillman argued the case before the SJC. Attorney Rebecca Jacobstein represented Cartagena.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.