Court upholds life in prison for pair convicted of murdering Hyde Park couple

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld the first-degree murder convictions of Earl Fulgiam and Michael Corbin for the 2011 double murder of Billie Marie Kee and Kevin Thomas, Jr. in their apartment at 957 Hyde Park Ave.

A Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted Fulgiam and Corbin in 2013 after hearing evidence that the two, aided by others, burst into the couple's apartment and, as her 4-year-old son slept in another room, bound Thomas's ankles with the cord from curling iron, then shot and stabbed their victims repeatedly. The motive: Robbery of Thomas, described in the decision as a "high level" drug dealer selling several thousand dollars a week of both marijuana and cocaine.

The justices ruled that investigators erred in obtaining cell-phone text messages without a warrant, saying such messages are personal property for which Constitutional search-and-seizure protections apply and dismissing the Suffolk County District Attorney's arguments that, among other things, the fact that Corbin's cell provider did not do background checks meant he had less of an expectation of privacy.

The court then considered whether this violation was so egregious that it led to the convictions and concluded it did not, because prosecutors presented other, overwhelming evidence that the two were guilty and that a jury would have convicted them even without the cell-phone data.

The decision to require a search warrant for such data should not affect future cases, because Suffolk County police have been applying for search warrants for several years now, a spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney's office says.