The state’s highest courts today affirmed the convictions of an East Boston man who killed and set fire to a neighborhood cat and a Dorchester man who stored an unregistered handgun in a secret compartment within his girlfriend’s car, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

“These were serious offenses that drew a great deal of community interest,” Conley said. “We owed it to the people of those communities not just to ensure that the evidence would support a conviction, but also that our work at trial would withstand the scrutiny of our appellate courts.”

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld the 2010 conviction of ALANDER GOODEN (D.O.B. 2/7/75), found guilty at trial of unlawfully possessing the Walther PPK semiautomatic handgun Boston and State police recovered from beneath the plastic frame around the gear shift of his girlfriend’s Toyota four years ago.

Officers had seen Gooden crawl out of the car – which had an expired registration sticker – on Baker Avenue on the evening of June 2, 2007. Nervous and sweating, Gooden told the officers when they approached that he’d never been in the Toyota and had merely been lying on the sidewalk next to it. Because of the expired registration, police made arrangements to have it towed. In the course of the inventory that followed, they recovered the handgun from beneath the gear shift’s loose cover.

Further testing developed a fingerprint belonging to Gooden on the underside of the gear shift covering. The firearm itself was loaded with six rounds in the magazine and a seventh in the chamber, ready to fire.

Later the same year, a district court judge ruled that Gooden had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the car, which was not his and which he claimed not to have occupied. Prosecutors assigned to Conley’s Gun Prosecution Task Force challenged that ruling, and the Massachusetts Appeals Court in 2009 ruled that the district court judge had erred.

In the interim, however, Gooden was arrested again for trafficking in cocaine. He was ultimately sentenced to 18 months on the gun and three years on the drugs.

“The evidence in this case … was sufficient to support a finding of constructive possession beyond a reasonable doubt,” Justices Cynthia Cohen, Gary Katzman, and Ariane Vuono wrote. “First, where the defendant was observed sitting in the driver’s seat and had the key to the vehicle … the jury would have been warranted in finding that the defendant had recently operated the vehicle …. Second, the jury could infer that the defendant had control over the area where the gun was hidden based on evidence that a fingerprint matching the defendant’s left middle finger was found on the inside of the gear cover ….Finally, the jury could infer the defendant’s consciousness of guilt from his deceptive conduct[.]”

The Appeals Court also affirmed the animal cruelty and arson convictions of LUIGI EPIFANIA (D.O.B. 7/17/83), found guilty in 2008 of killing a neighborhood cat, setting fire to its remains, and hurling it through the window of a Princeton Street residence.

On appeal, Epifania claimed the cat was unprotected by Massachusetts’ animal cruelty statute because some trial testimony suggested the feline was a “neighborhood cat” and the statute protects only animals belonging to “another person.”

“There is no apparent reason a domesticated cat could not be owned by more than one unrelated person,” Justice Peter Rubin wrote. “We need not, however, determine whether there was sufficient evidence to convict the defendant on these theories of the cat’s ownership, since it suffices to say in this case that the evidence of ownership by [one witness] was sufficient to support the conviction.”

Shortly after Epifania’s release from his 2½-year jail sentence for the East Boston case, he was arrested again for trafficking in OxyContin. He is currently serving a five-year state prison term.

Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Goldberger of Conley’s Special Prosecutions Unit prosecuted the Gooden case at trial and defended the conviction in arguments before the Appeals Court. Assistant District Attorney Anthony Dutra of the DA’s Appeals Division argued in support of Epifania’s conviction.