PORTLAND – The state’s highest court has upheld the convictions and life prison sentence of a Massachusetts man whose trial included DNA evidence eight years after the rape and murder of a 22-year-old South Portland woman.

Foster Bates of Attleboro, Mass., is serving a life term for murder and 30 years for rape in the 1994 strangulation of Tammy Dickson.

Jane Lee, Bates’ lawyer, had argued that three of the jurors who convicted her client should have been excluded from the panel because they read a newspaper article containing prejudicial information.

The story reported that Dickson’s 18-month-old son had been left in her South Portland apartment for three days after the murder, before Dickson’s body was found.

But the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Thursday that Bates had failed to show the jurors’ participation denied him a fair trial.

“The three jurors who were seated in this case all said that they could render a verdict based on the evidence. All three … stated that they could put aside anything they had read in the newspaper,” Justice Susan Calkins wrote for the court.

The court’s opinion noted that Bates’ lawyers did not challenge the three jurors’ participation at trial.