Damon Hastings, a man from Chester, Pennsylvania, was shot and killed on August 14, 1998. The confrontation that led to the fatal shooting reportedly began with personal jealousy involving a former girlfriend: prosecutors said James E. McLaughlin saw the woman in a car with Hastings at a Delaware liquor store, an encounter described as sparking the violence that followed.

McLaughlin, then 27 and living on West Ninth Street in Chester, was arrested and tried in Delaware County. On October 5, 1999, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder and reckless endangerment; five eyewitnesses testified for the prosecution. He was sentenced on November 9, 1999, to life imprisonment for the murder, a concurrent three-to-twenty-three-month firearms term, and a consecutive one-to-two-year term for reckless endangerment. Post-conviction and federal habeas challenges later raised claims about new statements and witness recantations, but those claims did not succeed in disturbing the conviction.