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A developer best known for his projects in South Boston and Dorchester has won a long-term lease from the National Park Service to convert the 11-story office building next to the Old State House into 45 apartments.

Developer Adam Burns filed with the Boston Planning Department for permission to convert offices 15 State St., at Devonshire Street into apartments under the city's offices-to-apartments pilot.

However, the project not eligible for tax break given to other such projects because it will remain owned by the federal government - since the tax break includes language letting the city seize property should something go wrong, and the feds would never allow that.  In his filing, will instead seek federal and state historic-renovation credits.

Burns said he won the right to turn the building into apartments through a competitive National Park Service RFP process. He adds that the National Park Service will not use its "sovereign" powers to bypass local zoning and planning review of the project.

Burns's filing calls for restaurants and other small commercial spaces on the building's first two floors, with apartments on the remaining nine floors.

The new apartments would consist of 30 studios and 15 one-bedroom units. Eight of the units would be rented as affordable, to people making no more than 60% of the Boston area median income. 

It describes the building, one side of which faces the historic Old State House:

The building, constructed in 1902 and designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, is a significant historic resource at the intersection of State Street and Devonshire Street, in front of the Old State House, and is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

15 State St. filings and meeting/comment schedule.

Even though it has already upheld Javaine Watson's first-degree murder conviction for the murder of Romeo McCubbin on Havelock Street in Dorchester in 2013, the Supreme Judicial Court today gave him and his lawyer permission to have "forensic testing" done of several phones seized after the murder in an attempt to make his case that he had nothing to do with the murder and that he was framed by one of the other three men who were also convicted - and that guy's allegedly lying girlfriend.

The ruling does not mean a new trial for Watson, but it lets him better build a possible second appeal that would let him argue for one.

Watson had sought permission to have an expert do a deep dive into data from the phones under a state law that allows for such post-conviction testing: Two phones seized that were tied to the murder and three more seized later when that other man was arrested a couple months later in an unrelated case before he was charged with McCubbin's murder.

The Suffolk County District Attorney's office, however, fought Watson, arguing, among other things, that the law only allows for "forensic" testing for "physical," biological evidence, such as DNA or even just the presence of blood, not for ethereal ones and zeroes in a cell phone's memory chip.

The state's highest court, however, suggested prosecutors need to be more careful reading the law in question, because it allows the study of  "evidence or biological material." Citing definitions of the word "evidence" from three separate dictionaries and the obvious meaning of the word "or," the court concluded that the DA had no case for blocking Watson's would-be testing, that data on a phone is as much evidence as fingerprints on a dashboard and so eligible for further study under a state law aimed at correcting possibly unjust verdicts.

The sought cell phones and their digital contents, which include, inter alia, call logs, text message logs, location information, and information from cell phone applications, fall comfortably within the scope of "evidence." 

Watson was charged and convicted for being the driver who ferried at least one of McCubbin's shooters from Kay's Oasis on Blue Hill Avenue, where he had attended a concert, to Havelock Street on Dec. 14, 2013, where they found him sitting in a car and pumped about a dozen bullets into him. Then, after he managed to open his car door and fall out, one of his shooters went over and kicked him in the head.

Key to Watson's convictions were the testimony of Nadira Amoroso and phone data showing numerous contacts between two specific phones, hers and a phone she testified she used to stay in touch with Watson.

Amoroso claimed to be dating Watson at the time, had loaned him the rented Lincoln SUV he drove the night of the murder and had seen him at Kay's Oasis shortly before McCubbin's death.  Prosecutors pointed to the 312 "contacts" found between her phone and a phone prosecutors say Watson had been using in the month before the murder as proof of their relationship.

Watson, however, argued that he was dating another woman, that the phone in question actually belonged to one of the other three men, Andrew Robertson - and that Amoroso was dating Robertson -  that he had a completely different phone number and that Amoroso perjured herself on the stand in testimony that tied Watson to the murder scene.

At trial, prosecutors discounted Watson's assertions, saying he and Robertson had simply "changed up" their phones.

The court continued that Watson met another criterion of the law, that the evidence be tested in a way that had not been done at trial. The justices wrote that Watson's trial lawyer knew about the other phones found with Robertson later on, but the judge denied his request to have them studied - and that lawyer did not appeal that decision, something "a reasonably effective attorney" would have done.

The court even described how possible evidence on the phones might help Watson seek a new trial:

Here, records show hundreds of calls between the 8764 number -- the cell phone number registered to Robertson's former girlfriend, which Robertson had canceled following the murder and which plausibly was being used by Robertson -- and at least three women with whom Robertson had a relationship. Trial counsel relied on these records to mount the defendant's principal defense -- that Amoroso, the only witness to testify that the defendant knowingly participated in an advanced plan to kill the victim by borrowing the Lincoln, fabricated her testimony to protect Robertson. The requested discovery, which may reveal contacts between Robertson and Amoroso on his other cell phones in the months preceding and following the murder, thus has the potential to uncover communications between Robertson and Amoroso, and those potential communications would bolster the defendant's defense by showing that Amoroso committed perjury in stating that she did not know Robertson and could not identify him; evidence of her perjury would in turn cast doubt on her testimony as a whole -- testimony the prosecution relied on in advancing its theory that the defendant was an active participant in the planning of the murder. ...

Evidence that Amoroso and the defendant did not in fact have numerous telephone calls together would "challenge the Commonwealth's account of the sequence of events" -- namely, that the defendant was a full participant in the advanced planning of the murder, including by asking Amoroso if he could borrow the Lincoln, which the Commonwealth alleged the defendant used to bring Robertson to the location of the shooting and then assist Robertson in fleeing the scene.

The court also explained what sort of analysis the phones might be subject to, in quoting from testimony by an expert hired by Watson's current lawyer to win the approval granted today to examine the phones:

The expert testified that digital forensic analysis of a cell phone is a multistep process involving proper seizure of the physical device, overcoming password protection to decrypt cell phone content, and extracting and memorializing data from the device and any media storage devices. The expert focused on digital forensic techniques that can access password-protected cell phones through "brute force" methodology and that can extract a wide array of digital content, including user-deleted content, call logs, text message logs, global positioning system (GPS) coordinates, and encrypted data from user applications. The expert noted that errors in the application of the forensic techniques can cause loss of data; he testified that an analyst should try to extract data from the cell phone as soon as the device is powered on, as a device can start overwriting older data once it is active.