BANGOR, Maine — The man known as the North Pond Hermit has paid back the people he stole from while hiding out for 27 years in the woods of central Maine, but the state’s highest court decided Thursday that he doesn’t have to pay for repairs to the woods road police damaged while investigating the case.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision vacating a $1,125 restitution order for work done to repair a private road that the Maine State Police damaged after Christopher Knight’s hideout was discovered near Rome in April 2013.
Knight paid nearly $2,000 in restitution for the things he stole from people to survive, but he was not willing to pay for grading a camp road he did not damage, his attorney, Walter McKee of Augusta, said during oral arguments on his appeal during a special session on May 5 at Washington Academy in East Machias.
In a 4-2 decision, the justices concurred.
“We conclude that in the circumstances of this case, the [state police] is not a statutorily eligible recipient of restitution, and we therefore vacate the order of restitution but affirm the remaining aspects of the judgment of conviction and the related sentence,” Associate Justices Joseph Jabar, Jeffrey Hjelm, Andrew Mead and Ellen Gorman stated in their decision.
Dissenting were Chief Justice Leigh Saufley and Senior Associate Justice Donald Alexander. They said that Knight should reimburse the state for its costs for repairing the road because the damage to it was incurred while police were recovering property stolen from Knight’s victims.
Superior Court Justice Nancy Mills used the environmental cleanup portion of Maine’s restitution law as the basis to order Knight to pay for the roadwork during his sentencing hearing in 2015.
Knight’s attorney had argued in his brief that “restitution is only allowed for true ‘economic loss.’ The alleged ‘victim’ is not anyone involved in Knight’s offenses but was the state police, and the creation of a road or repair was unrelated to Knight’s burglary and theft conviction.”
The attorney told the justices Mills should not have used the environmental cleanup provision to make Knight pay restitution.
McKee said he was satisfied with the outcome.
“The Law Court plainly and clearly accepted what we have said all along: forcing Chris to pay for the damage the Maine State Police, not Chris, caused to the road made no sense,” McKee said Thursday in an email. “This case is now, officially, over.”
Knight was arrested on April 13, 2013, in Rome while leaving the Pine Tree Camp with a number of food items, according to a previously published report.
He admitted to committing more than 1,000 burglaries in the North Pond area over the course of the 27 years he spent living in the woods. Knight pleaded guilty in October 2013 to 13 counts of burglary and theft and was admitted to the state’s co-occurring disorders court.
After he graduated from the mental health court in March 2015, Knight was ordered to serve seven months at the Kennebec County Jail. At that sentencing hearing, the state requested he be ordered to pay restitution for the road repair work, which Mills granted.