The Massachusetts Appeals Court declined to order a new trial for Trevor “Specialist” Higgins, who was convicted of second-degree murder for the 2009 shooting death of 32-year-old Carl Bonnie.
A jury convicted Higgins, now 42, of murder in 2013. Another man, Gregory “Buddha” Knight pleaded guilty to manslaughter before the trial began and is serving a nine-year prison sentence for his role in Bonnie’s murder.
Before his murder on Nov. 12, 2009, Bonnie had been texting with Knight and met up with him at an apartment on Clifford Street in Roxbury for a drug deal. Higgins was also at the apartment in the moments leading up to the shooting, and was armed with a shotgun, prosecutors proved at trial. Bonnie was shot and killed shortly after arriving at the apartment; after the murder, both Knight and Higgins fled to Maine.
According to the Suffolk County DA’s office:
Among other claims, Higgins argued on appeal that Knight’s sister and step-mother should not have been permitted to identify Higgins during their testimony at Higgins’ trial. The Appeals Court, however, ruled that the identifications were made in accordance with the procedures in place at the time of the trial.
He also argued testimony by the two witnesses recalling conversations with Knight should not have been allowed by the trial judge. The court found that the judge properly admitted the majority of the statements; the one statement that was erroneously admitted, however, did not present the likelihood of a miscarriage of justice in light of the full evidence presented against Higgins, which the court called “overwhelming.”
The court also found no error in the testimony of two additional civilian witnesses identifying Higgins and Knight in surveillance images, and that Higgins was not prejudiced by statements made in a prosecutor’s closing arguments.
