Crime

Mass. high court rejects appeal to retroactively apply a 2017 law to Lynn murder conviction

The Supreme Judicial Court said people who were given life in prison for felony murder didn’t have their rights violated before a 2017 law went into effect.

February 24, 2024

1 minute to read

The state’s highest court on Thursday unanimously ruled that it won’t retroactively apply a 2017 ruling that made it harder to convict someone of murder if they aided and abetted in the crime.

It’s the ninth time the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) held that the rights of people who played ancillary roles but were convicted of murder before the Brown law went into effect in 2017 were not violated.

The SJC’s decision came in response to an appeal by Rashad Shepherd, a Black man who was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of a Lynn man in 2014. According to the court, Shepherd and two other people “hatched a plan to rob the victim,” Wilner Parisse, of his marijuana stash.

The robbery went awry when Parisse fought back. He was shot in the chest and killed, and Shepherd was convicted of murder on the theory of felony murder with attempted unarmed robbery as the predicate felony. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Shepherd’s attorney, Claudia Leis Bolgen, submitted data showing that 18 percent of Black prisoners serving life without parole were convicted under the felony murder charge, compared to less than 5 percent of white prisoners, The Boston Globe reported.

In its ruling, the court acknowledged the disparity but said, “Far from showing that our [2017 Brown] decision resulted in disparate racial treatment, however, the data demonstrate that our decision eliminated a theory of first-degree murder that may have disproportionately affected Black persons.”

Leis Bolgen told the Globe that she and her client were disappointed but undeterred.

“This is unfair and unjust, serving life without parole for pre-Brown felony murder,” she told the Globe. “So we’re going to find a way. We’re going to try to take this opinion and take the positives out of it. … We are not going to give up.”