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High court tells murderer he can rot in jail

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld the first-degree murder conviction of Michael Hart of Dorchester for killing a woman who confronted him after he slashed his ex-girlfriend's throat on her front porch in 2005.

The state's highest court ruled that while a subpoena from the Suffolk County District Attorney's office for recordings of phone calls he made to his sister from jail while awaiting trial were not served properly, it didn't matter:

Given the compelling weight of [ex-girlfriend] Gibson's excited utterances identifying the defendant as her assailant, the forensic evidence of Gibson's blood on the defendant's shoe, and the apparent bias of the defendant's alibi witnesses, we are confident that the jailhouse telephone calls did not affect the trial's outcome.

Gibson survived his attack, Beother Billingslea, 67, did not.

The court also rejected Hart's argument that prosecutors unfairly biased the jury against him by raising the issue at closing of why his two alibi witnesses - his nephew and a friend of his mother's - refused repeated requests by police before the trial to talk to them.

Complete ruling.

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