BOSTON — The state’s highest court on Friday made what amounts to a technical correction in a 2011 Berkshire County triple-murder case linked to the Hells Angels.
The Supreme Judicial Court upheld the three first-degree murder convictions of Adam Lee Hall and rejected his request for a new trial. But the court also ruled Hall is not guilty of kidnapping one of the victims a year before the killings.
Hall, whom authorities said was a ranking member of the local Hells Angels chapter, had been serving five consecutive life sentences. With Friday’s ruling, that will be reduced to four consecutive life sentences.
“We conclude that the verdicts of murder in the first degree are consonant with justice, and we decline to exercise our authority … to order a new trial or direct the entry of verdicts of a lesser degree of guilt,” the court’s decision says. “We reverse the defendant’s kidnapping conviction for the conduct in 2010, as it was based on an inveiglement theory previously dismissed by the motion judge, but affirm all other judgments.”
The 47-page ruling details — and rejects — numerous other claims Hall made in an attempt to get a new trial.
Hall’s rejected claims include allegations of prosecutorial misconduct by then-Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless and his office.
Capeless resigned in 2018, but was appointed as a special assistant district attorney for the Hall appeal before the Supreme Judicial Court earlier this year.
Hall and his two accomplices, David Chalue, and Caius Veiovis, were all convicted of first-degree murder in 2014. Chalue and Veiovis are also serving life sentences without possibility of parole.
The victims — David Glasser, Edward Frampton and Robert Chadwell — were shot at Glasser’s Pittsfield home. Their bodies were dismembered, placed in plastic bags, transported in Hall’s Buick to rural Becket and buried in a ditch.
The victims were last seen alive the evening of Aug. 27, 2011. Authorities discovered the mutilated remains 13 days later.
