PORTLAND, Maine — The attorney for convicted murderer Dennis Dechaine asked the Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday to overturn a lower court’s decision denying Dechaine a new trial based on new analysis of DNA evidence.
Dechaine is serving the 26th year of a life sentence for the 1988 torture and murder of 12-year-old Sarah Cherry in Bowdoin.
On Thursday, Dechaine’s defense attorney, Steven C. Peterson, told the supreme court justices at the Portland courthouse that new analysis of fingernail clippings previously introduced into evidence at Dechaine’s 1989 trial could eliminate Dechaine as the possible perpetrator.
Cherry was kidnapped July 6, 1988, from a home in Bowdoin where she was babysitting. A search began after the parents of the baby came home and could not find Cherry. Her body was found two days later in the woods. An autopsy determined she had been sexually assaulted, stabbed many times and strangled.
Since his 1989 trial, Dechaine has maintained his innocence. In November 2013, Peterson argued new DNA analysis should prompt a new trial. But the following April, Maine Superior Court Justice Carl Bradford, who has handled Dechaine’s case since the original trial, denied Dechaine’s request for a new trial in Knox County Superior Court, stating that after considering old and new evidence in the case, he could not conclude the former Bowdoinham farmer would have received a different verdict.
Bradford said at the time that throughout the lengthy history of the case, the defense had sought to introduce evidence of another suspect. A private investigator hired by Dechaine’s supporters went to Florida and secretly acquired the man’s DNA from a coffee cup.
The Bangor Daily News is not naming the other man because he has not been charged.
Bradford said in April that even if the DNA on the coffee cup is that man’s, “none of the new DNA evidence implicates [the other man].”
Furthermore, he said, the defense had failed to connect DNA under Cherry’s fingernails to her murderer. There was no evidence of a struggle between Cherry and her attacker, and none of her fingernails were broken, he said. He also agreed with prosecution witnesses from the November 2013 hearing that the fingernail samples from Cherry were contaminated.
In his order, Bradford outlined substantial evidence he said pointed to Dechaine’s guilt, including items from Dechaine’s truck that were found at the house where Cherry was babysitting and abducted, and samples of rope used to tie her hands that were consistent with rope found in Dechaine’s truck and matched rope found in the woods between his truck and where Cherry’s body was found.
Multiple people testified Dechaine later confessed to the murder, and Bradford said no one could corroborate his alibi he was using drugs and walking around in the woods at the time of the murder.
The justices’ questions Thursday indicated some skepticism about Peterson’s arguments.
Referring to a 2006 law involving appeals of criminal cases that involve new DNA evidence that requires defendants to prove in court that the new DNA evidence only could have come from the perpetrator of the crime and that the DNA evidence must be strong enough to outweigh other evidence in the case, Justice Andrew M. Mead asked, “you think this is inconclusive evidence of stuff under the victim’s fingernail would have produced a different verdict?”
He added later, “your argument hangs on the thread that there was a struggle and somehow during the struggle the perpetrator’s DNA ended up underneath her fingernails.”
“DNA evidence is incredibly powerful when it … identifies to the exclusion of everyone else the person who did it,” Mead said. “This is a slightly different configuration. This says some DNA evidence is inconsistent for a person for whom there is an enormous pile of evidence against him.”
“We contend the evidence in the record, old and new, would be sufficient for a jury to find a different verdict,” Peterson said.
But Assistant Attorney General Donald W. Macomber on Thursday outlined “a mountain of evidence” presented at trial against Dechaine, including testimony that Dechaine confessed three times — the first time to his own attorney, who then told police where to find Cherry’s body.
Macomber told the court the fingernail evidence has degraded and was contaminated during the autopsy and during the year and a half that Justice Donald G. Alexander noted the evidence had been in the custody of the defense counsel.
Asked by Justice Ellen T. Gorman about the defense argument that Cherry struggled with her attacker, who left DNA on her fingernails, Macomber said, “she was bound by a rope from Dechaine’s truck. There was no evidence of a struggle.”
“For the last 25 years, the defendant has been perpetrating a fraud on the court and the state of Maine by suggesting that he is innocent,” Macomber said.
A 2013 decision by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court may indicate how justices will resolve Dechaine’s appeal. In January of that year, the court rejected a motion for a new trial for Olland Reese, who was convicted in 2003 of murdering 16-year-old Cody Green of Brunswick.
Reese’s attorney argued for a new trial based on DNA evidence in the case — specifically skin cells found on a length of duct tape used to bind Green’s wrists during the May 2002 slaying, also in Bowdoin.
But in a decision written by Chief Justice Leigh Saufley, the court ruled there were other plausible sources for the DNA and that the DNA evidence was unlikely to change the verdict because it didn’t counter “the voluminous evidence that implicated Reese in the murder.”
After the hearing, Cherry’s mother, Debbie Crosman, said she still has no doubt of Dechaine’s guilt and is “absolutely” confident the Maine Supreme Judicial Court will not overturn the lower court’s decision.
“Every time we come in here, we hear the same evidence,” Crosman said. “I don’t think the defense will ever give up. … I hope I die knowing he’s in prison and never getting out.”
Macomber said he expects the court to rule within a month.
Bangor Daily News writers Christopher Cousins and Stephen Betts contributed to this report.