PORTLAND, Maine — The attorney for a Waldo County man convicted of manslaughter for the 2011 shooting death of his friend argued for an appeal of the conviction Monday before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
Luke Bryant, 22, is serving nine years in prison for killing 19-year-old Tyler Seaney at Bryant’s apartment on a remote country road in Knox.
During his 2012 criminal trial, defense attorney Steven Peterson of Rockport asserted that his client had been pressured by police into admitting he had played a controversial “scare game,” during which Bryant and Seaney would point and fire guns that they thought weren’t loaded at each other in order to startle the other person.
Bryant is appealing his conviction because he believes the court should have suppressed statements he made to the police following the shooting, Peterson told the justices, adding that they were made during an interrogation without the benefit of Miranda warnings and that his client was in a state of shock and extreme distress that made his statements involuntary.
The night of the shooting, police asked Bryant to re-enact what had happened, kept him waiting in his bedroom for two and a half hours and then asked him to wait in a police cruiser for another two hours. Although police told Bryant he wasn’t under arrest, Peterson said that his client was too upset to really understand that.
“[The police] were going to get what they could from him,” the attorney told the law court Monday. “I think when they got him in the car, they weren’t going to let him out until they got a full statement.”
Assistant Attorney General Lauren LaRochelle, the state’s attorney on appeal, argued to the court that police did not restrain Bryant’s freedom of movement immediately after the shooting, that all questioning happened in the familiar circumstances of his home and that the tone of police questioning was “nonconfrontational.”
“The [Waldo County] Superior Court found that a reasonable person in Luke Bryant’s condition would have felt free to terminate the interview and leave,” she said.
One of the justices asked how Bryant’s police interview was different from that of William Wiley, the former Searsport music teacher whose conviction on multiple counts of unlawful sexual contact against a child was voided last year by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
A majority of judges on Maine’s highest court found that a Waldo County Sheriff’s Office detective had persuaded Wiley in the interview that by confessing, he would receive a more favorable sentence for the crime — and that this kind of persuasion rendered his statements involuntary.
“The court upheld that the matter of the guy being emotional was enough to find as a matter of law that the interview was involuntary,” one of the justices said Monday.
Though LaRochelle said that the facts were different in the state’s case against Bryant, the justices’ questions seemed to indicate a difference of opinion.
“This was a 19-year-old whose best friend’s body was lying in the house while he was talking to officers, being questioned relentlessly. Why is this OK?” one justice asked LaRochelle.
“He was told he didn’t have to speak to them,” the state’s attorney answered.
“So was Wiley,” a justice responded.
A court clerk said after the oral arguments were presented that the state’s highest court will render its judgment in writing, but did not know when the decision will be made.