If state Supreme Court justices vacate Adam Montgomery’s murder conviction, they’d have to agree that including testimony about giving his 5-year-old daughter Harmony a black eye months earlier helped convince the jury he beat her to death in December 2019.

“The principal concern with these issues is that a defendant be tried on the merits of the (murder) charge act and not on the propensity and character inferences that may be drawn from evidence of other acts and wrongs,” Montgomery's attorney, Pamela Phelan, told justices in Concord Wednesday during oral arguments for the appeal of his second-degree murder conviction.

Montgomery, now 35 and incarcerated in Virginia, was found guilty in 2024 of second-degree murder, second-degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, tampering with a

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