FORT KENT, Maine — An attorney for a Caribou man who claims that his client’s constitutional rights were violated after he was arrested in 2013 without probable cause argued before the state’s highest court Thursday that the illegal drugs that were found during the subsequent search should have been suppressed as evidence at trial.
The appeal on behalf of Chad D. Lagasse, 29, was one of three the Maine Supreme Judicial Court considered in front of high school students from northern Aroostook Thursday during the justices’ visit to the University of Maine at Fort Kent Thursday. The Law Court annually goes on the road to make such appearances before students.
Justices will convene Oct. 26 at Marshwood High School in South Berwick. Maine’s high court visited Washington Academy in East Machias in May.
Lagasse was one of two men arrested by the Caribou Police Department in January 2013 in connection with a home invasion in Caribou. Lagasse was charged with four felonies related to the home invasion, but was subsequently acquitted at jury trial in November 2015 of all but the count of aggravated trafficking in scheduled drugs. During interviews with police, Eric Mowatt, 28, of Limestone, the other defendant in the home invasion, who was convicted of unsworn falsification for making false statements in the past, implicated Lagasse in the crime, but testified that he only did so when police “suggested that someone close to him might be charged as his accomplice instead,” according to court documents.
Lagasse was arrested after a traffic stop, according to court documents. Aroostook County District Attorney Todd Collins said that the basis for the probable cause determination that resulted in the traffic stop made by the Caribou police officers was the information given by the victim of the robbery, who identified two home invaders — one of whom she positively identified as Mowatt — and the statements of Mowatt, which positively identified Lagasse as the second armed assailant in the home invasion and robbery.
During the January 2013 traffic stop, officers noticed Lagasse struggling and “attempting to conceal a bag of pills presumed to have been hidden in his pants.” Several pills also were found on the ground where he was standing, court documents stated.
Lagasse’s attorney, Christopher J. Coleman of Presque Isle, told justices Thursday that officers lacked probable cause to arrest the defendant and that Mowatt was an unreliable informant who provided uncorroborated information.
Several of the questions asked by the justices centered on the fact that Mowatt had implicated Lagasse, which the state said had provided the probable cause for his arrest without a warrant.
“The victim identified one defendant, and then he had identified your client,” said Chief Justice Leigh I. Saufley. “Isn’t that enough for probable cause?”
Although Coleman disagreed, Aroostook County District Attorney Todd Collins said that the state was well within the bounds of the Fourth Amendment when making the traffic stop to arrest Lagasse.
Collins pointed to state case law going back to 1850 that “the unsupported and uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice is a sufficient basis for a criminal conviction.”
He maintained that the judgment of the Aroostook County Superior Court should be upheld.
Mowett was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery with all but three years suspended and two years probation. He also was given a five-year suspended sentence for theft and one year of probation.
Students also heard arguments Thursday in a challenge to the state’s wrongful birth law and an appeal in a child pornography case out of Penobscot County.