XAVIER RAVENELL - 2 yo (2004) - Boston MA

The state’s highest court on Monday refused to grant new trials for a Boston couple convicted of killing the man’s ex-girlfriend and suffocating his 2-year-old son, then throwing the boy’s body out a second-floor window in a bag of trash.Jims Beneche and his girlfriend, Jessica Deane, were convicted in the 2004 killings of Beneche’s former girlfriend, Kayla Ravenell, and her son, Xavier Ravenell. Beneche was the boy’s father.Kayla Ravenell’s body was found inside a trash bag on the banks of a Braintree pond. When police went to Beneche’s East Boston apartment to question him, they saw a trash bag being thrown out the window. Inside, they found Xavier’s body, mixed with trash.In his appeal, Beneche argued that the judge at his trial made several errors, that one of the jurors slept during some of the testimony and that his lawyer was ineffective.Deane argued that the judge should not have allowed jurors to hear recordings of her telephone calls from jail and gave the jury faulty instructions.The Supreme Judicial Court rejected the couple’s claims and upheld their first-degree murder convictions. Both Beneche and Deane are serving mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole.Prosecutors told jurors that Beneche and Deane plotted and carried out the slayings together. They said Beneche was angry because his wages had been garnished to pay child support for his son and said Deane was "obsessed" with Beneche and would do anything for him.