The Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday upheld the manslaughter conviction of Victoria Scott, who was found guilty last year of stabbing a man to death in 2017.
However, it was not a unanimous decision, with Justice Joseph Jabar writing the dissenting opinion. He believes Scott was denied a fair trial and that her conviction should be vacated.
Scott, now 26, claimed during her jury trial in 2018 that she had been defending herself the evening of Feb. 8, 2017, when she plunged a knife repeatedly into Edwin Littlefield’s leg during a fight that started as a minor argument between acquaintances at a home in the town of Waldo.
But the jury convicted her after less than 2 1/2 hours of deliberation. Last August, Justice Robert Murray sentenced Scott to 16 years in prison with all but 11 years suspended, followed by four years of probation.
Her defense team argued to the Law Court that two of the state’s witnesses had unfairly prejudiced the jury and deprived Scott of a fair trial. Defenders also asserted that the prosecutor made several statements during his closing argument that constituted prosecutorial misconduct and compromised the integrity of the trial. Those included arguing two theories that had not been supported by evidence presented during the trial and misrepresented two pieces of testimony to support the arguments.
But the majority of justices did not agree that mistakes or misstatements made during the trial were enough to vacate the conviction. One of the witnesses called out by Scott’s attorneys in the appeal was the woman who owned the home where Littlefield’s stabbing took place.
According to the appeal, under cross-examination, the homeowner referred to Scott’s two prior alleged stabbings, which the court explicitly did not allow during the manslaughter trial. The homeowner said that she had told police that her son had previously been stabbed by Scott.
Even so, the justices wrote in their decision, Scott and her attorneys did not object to the homeowner’s testimony during the trial, expressly declined a curative instruction in an attempt to avoid highlighting the statement and did not move for a mistrial.
Another problematic witness, at least according to Scott’s defense team, was the Maine State Police detective who interviewed her after the incident. During cross-examination, the detective said that Scott had killed the victim.
Her defense attorney objected, telling the judge that the point of the trial was for the jury to decide if Scott was responsible for Littlefield’s death and wanted the statement struck from the record. Murray agreed to this and told the jurors that they were to disregard the statement.
According to Scott’s appeal, this was not enough, because the statement could not “be erased from the jurors’ minds.” The justices noted that at the trial, there was no dispute that Scott had stabbed Littlefield repeatedly and that he died from the resulting wounds.
“Thus, we are not persuaded that the detective’s statement that Scott killed the victim was unfairly prejudicial,” the justices wrote in the majority opinion.
But even if they accepted Scott’s argument that the jury was unfairly prejudiced against her, having the judge instruct the jury to disregard the statement should have been sufficient.
“We discern no error in the court’s decision to issue a curative instruction,” the justices wrote.
Additionally, Scott asserted in her appeal that the prosecutor had said in his closing remarks that she had stabbed Littlefield while they were both standing up, and that she was wearing pajama pants and not jeans when she was outside, where the stabbing occurred.
Scott and her attorneys did not object to these statements during the trial, the justices noted in their decision, adding that to prevail on an argument that prosecutorial misconduct amounted to obvious error, a defendant must demonstrate that there was misconduct that went unaddressed by the court and that the error was plain. If the defendant can meet this burden, she still has to show that the error was great enough to have affected the outcome of the trial.
What the prosecutor had said about the timing of the stabbing was important, Scott argued in her appeal, because it “pushed the fiction that [she] ran out of the house with the knife in her hand and stabbed [the victim] as he walked away from her. But the justices found in the majority opinion that the prosecutor’s statements about the timing of the stabbing were fairly based on the facts presented in evidence at the trial.
As for the question of pajama pants versus jeans, Scott argued in her appeal that this was an important detail because it showed her state of mind. She testified she always kept her knife in the pocket of her jeans and did not ordinarily keep the knife in the pocket of her pajama pants. She testified that she had pulled on her jeans over her pajama pants when she went outside, but a friend who was at the house that night said that Scott had not changed into jeans until she returned to the house after Littlefield was stabbed.
“The prosecutor’s assertion regarding pajama pants was not prosecutorial misconduct,” the justices wrote in the majority opinion, adding that additional “minor misstatements” made by the prosecutor did not rise to the level of prosecutorial misconduct, either.
As well, Scott argued that the court made a mistake when it denied her request for a new trial after a female juror had spoken with several people on the last day of the trial, and that the sentence imposed on her by the trial court is unconstitutional because it is disproportionate and “cruel and unusual.” She argued in her appeal that the court punished her for having an autism spectrum disorder that might limit her ability to show remorse.
But the Law Court did not agree, with the majority of justices finding that the juror did not express any bias when she spoke with others. They also did not find that Scott’s sentence was unconstitutional or levied without taking into consideration her psychological evaluation.
Jabar, however, wrote in his dissenting opinion that he believed Scott’s conviction should be reversed because of the cumulative effect of inadmissible and prejudicial testimony. He said that the fact that the court admitted the testimony of the witness who said that Scott had previously stabbed her son could by itself have warranted a mistrial.
The dissenting justice also wrote that when the Maine State Police detective took the stand as an experienced criminal investigator and called Scott a “very competent and composed liar,” it could have improperly swayed the jury against her. As well, Jabar said that when the prosecutor said in his closing argument that Scott went into the bedroom and grabbed her knife, then stabbed the victim as he was walking away, it was “extremely prejudicial because it is evidence of premeditation, a fact devastating to Scott’s claim of self-defense.”
“I am unable to conclude that the jury was able to weigh and determine Scott’s credibility fairly and independently,” Jabar wrote. “The cumulative effect of these plain errors likely had an effect on the outcome of the trial.”