Boston, August 21, 2012 – The state’s highest court today affirmed an Everett man’s conviction and life sentence for the 2005 murder of Lourdes Hernandez during an armed robbery, rejecting the defendant’s claims of impropriety during the trial prosecutor’s closing argument, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the 2006 conviction of EDWIN MEJIA (D.O.B. 6/2/78) for first-degree murder in Hernandez’ June 11, 2005, stabbing death as she worked an unscheduled shift at the LukOil Mini-Mart on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester.

Mejia, a former employee who was fired from the store the previous November, is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for Hernandez’ homicide.
On appeal, Mejia accused the trial prosecutor of improper statements during his closing arguments. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Frances Duffly, the high court rejected those claims, finding that “there was no error requiring reversal of the defendant’s conviction.”

Specifically, Mejia claimed that the prosecutor improperly appealed to jurors’ sympathies in a reference to the victim as “[t]his woman, this thirty-nine year old woman, she was a sister, she was a daughter, she was a niece, and she is none of these things anymore because of what he did to her. Lourdes Hernandez is only a memory because of this defendant.”

The court found the prosecutor’s remarks “did not give rise to prejudicial error requiring reversal,” and that the jury was not only instructed by the trial court judge “not to deal with the case from a position of sympathy or compassion,” but also urged by the prosecutor himself to come to decision based solely on the facts of the case.

“Finally,” Duffly wrote, “the Commonwealth’s case, while circumstantial, was strong.”

Mejia also accused the trial prosecution of “harping on the brutality” of the crime scene, where Hernandez was found in a pool of blood from numerous stab wounds, with a plastic bag secured over her head and her jeans and underwear around one ankle.
The references to the viciousness of the crime were not improper, Duffly wrote, “(b)ecause the violent nature of the murder was relevant to whether it was committed with extreme atrocity or cruelty.”

The court ruled that the prosecutor’s statement at the end of his closing argument urging jurors to hold Mejia accountable falls under “permissible rhetoric.”

Evidence introduced during the two-week trial proved that Mejia had planned to rob the store’s safe, but had expected a different employee to be on duty when he arrived there with a knife on the morning of the robbery. Medical experts said at trial that Hernandez suffered numerous stab wounds in the neck, chest, and body during the attack that took her life.

Mejia was identified as a suspect when Boston Police homicide detectives obtained a list of past and present LukOil employees. Eyewitness statements put him in the employees-only section of the store on the morning of the incident, and additional evidence shows that he cashed in a large amount of money at an Everett supermarket and wired it out of state in the hours following Hernandez’ death.

Assistant District Attorney Macy Lee argued the case before the SJC. Assistant District Attorney John Pappas prosecuted the case at trial. Mejia was represented on appeal by attorney Robert S. Sinsheimer.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.