< Back to front page Text size – +

Trial begins in 1979 shooting death in Boston

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 18, 2009 07:39 PM

(Video by John R. Ellement)

By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff

More than 30 years after a Jamaica Plain man was shot outside a Dorchester home, the trial of his alleged killer began, with the defense attorney urging a jury not to believe his client’s confessions.

Richard Franklin is charged with manslaughter for the May 13, 1979 shooting of Gregory McDavid, a married father of two from Jamaica Plain. McDavid’s death went unsolved until Franklin confessed to the shooting in a series of interviews with Brockton and Boston police in 1995 and 1996.

But Franklin’s attorney, James Coviello, told the jury in his opening statement they should discard the confessions. “There will be discrepancies that will show his confession, his statements, his claim of doing this, is unreliable and false,’’ he said.

After being charged with shooting McDavid on Greenbrier Street on Mother’s Day in 1979, Franklin was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial and was hospitalized until 2005, when the courts decided he had regained his sanity.

In his opening, Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Ian Polumbaum told jurors that it will be made clear to them that Franklin was “troubled” at the time of the shooting -- Franklin was then just 16 years old -- and that he was “troubled’’ when he spoke with police in the mid-1990s.

Yet Franklin “wasn’t so disturbed, wasn’t so out of touch with reality that he would take credit for a crime someone else did," Polumbaum said. He said Franklin confessed to the shooting and said someone gave him a gun and told him to rob McDavid, who was selling marijuana at the time.

The prosecutor said the details Franklin provided were unique to the crime scene, and Franklin’s own words should be used to provide justice for McDavid’s family.

McDavid's wife, son and daughter were in the courtroom. Dawn McDavid-Bauman, her older brother, Christopher, and their mother, Laura, held onto each other and sometimes cried as they listened to the opening statements and as Franklin spoke with a relative sitting in the audience before the trial got underway.

Franklin is charged with manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. If convicted, he will be credited for the time he spent in a psychiatric hospital awaiting trial. The trial continues before Superior Court Judge Judith A. Fabricant Friday.