The man who shot 20-year-old Moses Grant in the head, killing him, more than 25 years ago will not receive a new trial, a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court ruled last week.

Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said the Jan. 17 decision by Justice Margot Botsford ensures that HASSAN THOMAS will serve out the remainder of his life term for Grant’s 1996 homicide, for which he was convicted of first-degree murder under the theory of deliberate premeditation.

“Moses Grant’s family has endured not only his murder but his killer’s repeated attempts to escape accountability for it,” Conley said. “They probably asked themselves when it would ever end. With this decision, we can finally say it’s over.”

Thomas, then 21, was standing on Stanwood Street in Grove Hall when he saw Grant driving along with two friends. Apparently acting out of enmity over a prior dispute, he produced a handgun, took aim as the car drove by, and shot Grant in the back of the head. Grant died of his injuries.
His two passengers and a bystander – all of whom knew Thomas – later identified him as the gunman.

The high court unanimously affirmed Thomas’ conviction in 1999, rejecting his claims that, among other things, the trial judge acted improperly by providing jurors with a missing witness instruction. Thomas’ trial attorney predicted in his opening statement that jurors would hear alibi testimony from a witness, but later chose not to call that witness. The SJC found no impropriety in a post-trial instruction allowing jurors to consider that fact in their deliberations. His appeal to a federal court on the same grounds was also rejected.

In 2009, Thomas moved for a new trial alleging ineffective assistance on the part of his trial attorney. A Suffolk Superior Court judge denied that motion last year, and Thomas sought to appeal that decision to the SJC through a single justice, a maneuver requiring that he present a “new and substantial issue” for the high court’s consideration.

In that most recent appeal, Thomas claimed that the attorney who represented him at trial and on his first appeal was ineffective with regard to his alibi witnesses, and that he could have brought this claim earlier had he chosen a different appellate attorney.

Botsford rejected that tactic, finding that “the Commonweath’s case against Thomas was very strong. There were three eyewitnesses to the crime, all physically very close to the shooting, all of whom knew Thomas beforehand, and all of whom identified him as the person who shot the victim, making those identifications to the police and, with respect to two of the witnesses, to family friends or relatives (or both) close to the time of the shooting …. I am confident that trial counsel’s challenged conduct relating to the alibi witnesses was not ‘likely [to have] deprived [Thomas] of an otherwise available substantial ground of defence’” under a 1974 standard.

Assistant District Attorney Teresa Anderson of Conley’s Appeals Division argued against Thomas’ most recent appeal. Katherine Moran is the DA’s victim-witness advocate assigned to the case. Attorney Robert Sheketoff represented the defendant.