Court upholds life sentence for killer of Longwood CVS clerk

The Supreme Judicial Court told Daniel Rogers today it didn't believe for a second he somehow acquired a knife after runing out of a Longwood Galleria CVS with 11 tubes of stolen toothpaste and that he was forced to stab two of the clerks chasing him, one fatally.

The court upheld Rogers' first-degree murder sentence for the 2004 attack, which means Rogers will spend the rest of his life in prison without possibility of parole.

Rogers argued, in part, that he was incorrectly convicted of a murder during the process of committing a felony because he might have acquired the knife he used to kill Cristian Giambrone after he left the store, rather than possessing it during the theft.

When the defendant pulled a knife from his clothing he was engaged in a struggle with three men who had chased him directly from the CVS store. The three employees had followed him from the store until they caught him a short distance from it. There is no evidence that the defendant armed himself between his taking of the goods and his physical confrontation with the employees.

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