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Maine’s “go-to” legal expert on child pornography cases helped build the case against former Maine gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler.
While the Maine State Police have been investigating Cutler since December 2021, the case against him rapidly picked up pace after investigators executed search warrants on the 75-year-old man’s homes in Brooklin and Portland. On Friday, Hancock County District Attorney Matt Foster charged Cutler with four felony counts of possessing sexually explicit material involving a child under age 12.
Cutler was released on bail Saturday morning. He had been held on $50,000 bail.
Cutler allegedly admitted to his wife Melanie while police were searching their Hancock County home that he had child pornography in his possession, Foster told the Bangor Daily News in an interview Friday.
Court summaries of what led police to Cutler’s homes and what they seized are not expected to be released publicly until next week at the earliest. But Foster had been provided with a summary that he used to charge Cutler. Those charges came just two days after the Office of the Maine Attorney General told Foster about the investigation.
Foster said Paul Rucha, an assistant attorney general, reviewed material from investigators and helped put together the initial search warrant.
Rucha is a well-known expert when it comes to these types of cases, said Chris Almy, an assistant district attorney for Penobscot and Piscataquis counties. Almy is a former district attorney for those counties and is the only candidate running to become the Penobscot County district attorney.
“He is the go-to person when you’re trying to develop a search warrant or you’re trying to develop a child porn case,” Almy said.
Almy, a longtime prosecutor in Maine, said cases like this can play out in a variety of ways and there is no set timeline when it comes to the investigation and arrest. Sometimes cases involving possession of child pornography can come together in days, other times over a longer period, he said.
“You have to look at each case on its own,” Almy said. “There is no set rule and they are computer-intensive investigations.”
Almy said that from his experience, investigators and prosecutors are not only looking at possession of child pornography, but also at things like search histories that indicate someone was actively seeking out the content and didn’t just somehow stumble upon it.
“You look for search terms, what were they looking for and where were they looking for it,” Almy said. “If you have evidence in the computer that shows they are looking for child porn, then obviously what someone possesses didn’t happen by accident. They looked for it and got it.”
Looking for this type of evidence is crucial for prosecutors so they can show that a defendant didn’t just stumble upon the content on some other legal adult pornography site, and that the intention was there to seek out the illegal material, he said.
Almy said he wasn’t sure why the case was turned over to the Hancock County district attorney’s office instead of the attorney general’s office prosecuting the case.
“You can’t read too much into cases like these,” Almy said. “There are a lot of reasons things go the way they go.”
There will likely be more charges filed against Cutler as the investigation continues, Foster said, although he didn’t specify on what they might be.
Department of Public Safety spokesperson Shannon Moss said the state police’s computer crimes unit will do a forensic investigation on the devices police took during the raids on Cutler’s homes. That process could take months, she said.
The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment, and Cutler’s lawyer could not be reached for comment on Saturday.