Man to spend rest of life in prison for murdering a Roxbury teen in 1984

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that Robert Scott, a.k.a. Sultan Omar Chezulu, got a fair trial in 2010 for a murder 26 years earlier, despite errors during closing by the prosecutor.

The ruling by the state's highest court means that Scott, now 66, will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

After Elsie "Yolanda" Hernandez, was found dead under garbage in a vacant lot, Scott continued to live in Boston until moving to Atlanta in 2004. Detectives re-opened their investigation in 2006 at the request of her sister; when they submitted DNA samples to an FBI database, Scott's genetic signature came up as a match. He was arrested in Atlanta in 2008.

In 2010, a jury agreed with Suffolk County prosecutors that Scott raped, beat and strangled Hernandez, 18, as she was on her way home from work, and found him guilty of first-degree murder.

In their appeal, Scott's lawyers argued that police notes from the case suggested Scott had had consensual sex with the woman several days earlier and that the real killer was another man, possibly the angry boyfriend of a friend of hers. The court, however, said the detective whose notes were cited was just being diligent in noting all potential leads and that that is not good enough for reversing a murder conviction when the other evidence was so strong.

The court did agree with Scott's lawyers that the prosecutor should not have scoffed at the defense's closing arguments about the possibility of another killer when the prosecutor had convinced the judge to exclude much of the defense's evidence for that. That, the court said, is a violation of Massachusetts case law that a lawyer may not "exploit[] the absence of evidence that had been excluded at his request."

But, the court continued, the other evidence against Scott was so strong that the jury likely would have still convicted Scott and because they did not make up the central theme of the case against him.