Court: Dorchester man may have helped murderers, but state didn't show enough evidence to convict him of murder

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today prosecutors cannot retry Adam Simpkins for the 2010 murder of Cordell McAfee because they failed in a 2012 trial to directly connect him to the death.

The state's highest court acknowledged that Simpkins was among a group of men who menaced McAfee the week before, that Simpkins got out of a car with the alleged murderer and another man shortly before McAfee was shot as he sat on his porch at Dorchester Avenue and Roseland Street - the same car they'd been seen getting into the week before after the confrontation - and that the two shooters ran into Simpkins's house after the murder.

But absent in the prosecution case, the court ruled, was the evidence connecting Simpkins to the planning or execution of the murder.

There is insufficient evidence about the nature of the encounter one week before the shooting to imply an intent to kill or even a motive to kill on the part of anyone involved. Even were we to infer from the presence of the Taurus that the shooters had been present at that earlier encounter, we still would lack any evidence demonstrating that they had any contact at all with the defendant prior to the shooting. ...

The close proximity of the shooters to the defendant's home prior to the murder and their flight simply do not support a finding beyond a reasonable doubt of any express or implied agreement by the defendant before or during the commission of the crime to act in concert during or after the shooting. Accordingly, as a matter of law, the Commonwealth did not satisfy its burden of proof.

The ruling stems from Simpkins's 2012 trial, in which a Suffolk Superior Court jury found him guilty of unlawful possession of firearms and accessory after the fact of murder, but deadlocked on the actual murder charge and a charge for assault with intent to murder for the non-fatal shooting of McAfee's brother. Prosecutors asked the judge to delay sentencing on the lesser charges until after they retried him for murder; Simpkins's attorneys then filed a motion asking the judge to order a required finding of not guilty on the charges of murder and assault with intent to murder.

The judge in the case erred in denying the motion, the high court ruled, handing the case back to him to consider an appropriate sentence on the lesser charges.

A year ago, another Suffolk Superior Court jury acquitted Lavonrence Perkins of Mattapan on charges he was the actual gunman in the case.