The state’s highest court today affirmed the murder and attempted murder convictions of a Dorchester man who slashed his ex-girlfriend’s throat, nearly killing her, and fatally stabbed an elderly man who tried to intervene on her behalf, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

MICHAEL HART (D.O.B. 7/4/56) is serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder of 67-year-old Beother Billingslea plus 10 years for slashing the surviving victim’s throat on Billingslea’s Millet Street porch on the evening of April 30, 2005. In appealing his 2007 convictions, Hart argued that his alibi witnesses were improperly impeached at trial and his recorded phone calls from jail improperly admitted into evidence; the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts disagreed on both counts.

Hart called two witnesses in his defense: his nephew and a long-time friend of his mother. Though both of those witnesses testified at trial that Hart was in their presence in another location when Billingslea was killed and the surviving victim was stabbed, neither had acknowledged or returned the repeated efforts of Boston Police homicide detectives to speak with them.

Under cross-examination at trial, Suffolk homicide prosecutors elicited testimony from those defense witnesses that they made no effort to provide authorities with this alibi before trial and had not returned the detectives’ repeated calls, suggesting closing arguments that the alibi testimony was therefore not credible. Hart’s appeal contends that there was insufficient foundation for the evidence and argument.

In a seven-page decision authored by Justice Ralph Gants, the high court cites a prior Appeals Court decision noting that prosecutors are required to “lay a foundation for this type of cross-examination by first establishing that [1] the witness knew of the pending charges in sufficient detail to realize that he possessed exculpatory information, [2] that the witness had reason to make the information available, [3] that he was familiar with the means of reporting it to authority, and [4] that the defendant or his lawyer, or both, did not ask the witness to refrain from doing so.”

The high court ruled that prosecutors had met the first three criteria. As to the fourth, the high court abolished it, writing that “the prosecutor need not elicit from the witness that she was not asked by the defendant or the defense attorney to refrain from disclosing her exculpatory information to law enforcement authorities …. While we have not earlier abolished this fourth foundational requirement, we have deemed it satisfied by the absence of evidence that the defendant or his lawyer asked the witness to refrain from disclosing the exculpatory information to the police; we have not required that the witness testify to the absence of such instructions.”

The defendant also claims on appeal that certain of his phone calls from jail while awaiting trial, which suggest that he was coaching a defense witness, should not have been introduced into evidence. The high court again disagreed, ruling that “the constitutional rights of an adult pre-trial detainee, such as the defendant, are not violated when the sheriff provides copies of the detainee’s recorded telephone calls in response to a subpoena.”

Moreover, the court wrote, “Given the compelling weight of [the surviving victim’s] excited utterances identifying the defendant as her assailant, the forensic evidence of [the surviving victim’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 outcome.”

Former Assistant District Attorney Kelly Downes tried the case with defense attorney John Miller. Assistant District Attorney Jack Zanini, chief of Conley’a Appeals Division, argued the case before the SJC with defense attorney Ruth Greenberg. Marisela Ramirez was the DA’s victim-witness advocate assigned to the case.