State v. Dechaine

• Decision Date: 21 July 2015
• Docket Number: Docket No. Kno–14–187.
• Citation: 2015 ME 88,121 A.3d 76
• Parties: STATE of Maine v. Dennis J. DECHAINE.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

121 A.3d 76

2015 ME 88

STATE of Maine

v.Dennis J. DECHAINE.

Docket No. Kno–14–187.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Argued: May 14, 2015.

Decided: July 21, 2015.

Steven C. Peterson, Esq. (orally), West Rockport, for appellant Dennis J. Dechaine.

Janet T. Mills, Attorney General, and Donald W. Macomber, Asst. Atty. Gen. (orally), Office of the Attorney General, Augusta, for appellee State of Maine.

Panel: ALEXANDER, MEAD, GORMAN, and CLIFFORD, JJ.

Opinion

MEAD, J.

[¶ 1] Dennis J. Dechaine appeals from a judgment of the Superior Court (Knox County, Bradford, J. ) denying his motion for a new trial, which was brought pursuant to the post-conviction DNA analysis statute, 15 M.R.S. §§ 2136 –2138 (2014). Dechaine contends that the court erred or abused its discretion in (1) finding that the new DNA evidence admitted at the hearing, “when considered with all the other evidence in the case, old and new,” did not make it probable that a different verdict would result from a new trial, id. § 2138(10)(C)(1) ; (2) limiting the evidence that could be presented at the hearing to evidence concerning the new DNA testing and analysis; and (3) denying his motion to recuse. We affirm the judgment.

I. BACKGROUND

[¶ 2] In 1989, Dechaine was convicted of the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of twelve-year-old Sarah Cherry. State v. Dechaine, 572 A.2d 130, 131–32 (Me.1990), cert. denied, 498 U.S. 857, 111 S.Ct. 156, 112 L.Ed.2d 122 (1990). We have addressed the case three times before today: id. (direct appeal); State v. Dechaine, 630 A.2d 234 (Me.1993) (affirming the trial court's denial of Dechaine's motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence); and State v. Dechaine, 644 A.2d 458 (Me.1994) (affirming the trial court's order requiring Dechaine to return certain trial exhibits). In two of those decisions we summarized portions of the evidence heard by the jury at Dechaine's trial, concluding that “[b]ased on all the evidence, the jury's conclusion that Dechaine was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of all charges submitted to it was rational.” Dechaine, 572 A.2d at 131–32 & n. 3 ; see Dechaine, 630 A.2d at 236–37.

[¶ 3] In 2000, the United States District Court for the District of Maine (Carter, J. ) denied Dechaine's petition for a federal writ of habeas corpus, affirming the recommended decision of United States Magistrate Judge David M. Cohen. Dechaine v. Warden, 2000 WL 33775285 (D.Me. Nov. 21, 2000), aff'g Dechaine v. Warden, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12289, 2000 WL 1183165 (D.Me. July 28, 2000). Because the Superior Court's judgment in the case at bar rested in part on its finding that “as several other courts have found, the evidence of Dechaine's guilt is substantial,” we think it useful, before discussing the facts specific to Dechaine's current motion for a new trial, to begin with Magistrate Judge Cohen's extensive review of that evidence insofar as it is relevant to this appeal.¹

A. Pre–Trial Motion To Obtain DNA Evidence

On January 26, 1989[,] Dechaine, through counsel Thomas J. Connolly, filed a motion for a continuance and permission to conduct DNA testing, then “a radical and new technique,” on fingernail clippings taken from Cherry's body. The court promptly scheduled a hearing at which Judith Brinkman, a forensic chemist with the Maine State Police Crime Lab, testified and explained the forensic significance of DNA testing. Brinkman testified that in contrast to traditional serological testing methods, DNA “should be like a fingerprint, much more discriminating from one person compared to another except for in identical twins because identical twins have the exact same DNA.” There were three methods of DNA testing; the method that Connolly proposed to use was known as “polymerase chain reaction

,” or “PCR,” then conducted only by one laboratory in California (which had a three- to four-month backlog) and in the “research stages” at the FBI laboratory.

Brinkman testified that she had been provided with ten fingernail clippings obtained during Cherry's autopsy and had used up eight of them (all but the thumbnails) to perform blood-typing tests. The blood adhering to the nails was found to be human blood containing A and H antigens, consistent with type A blood but also possibly resulting from a mixture of bloods of type

A and/or type O. The blood on the nails could not have been contributed by someone with type AB or B blood; however, that ruled out a relatively small percentage of the population inasmuch as persons with type A blood comprised forty-one percent of the population and persons with type O forty-five percent.

Brinkman had tested the whole blood of both Dechaine and Cherry, determining that of Dechaine to be type O and that of Cherry to be type A. She theorized that the blood on the nails was solely that of Cherry, noting that Cherry's hands were found bound and positioned near her neck, which had been bleeding. She further explained, “There was nothing that led me to believe that there was a mixture [of bloods]. If someone had scratched someone hard enough to make them bleed and cause crust underneath the fingernails, you would expect to find tissue, some type of skin material or something indicating that there you know, that there had been scratching or you would expect to find some type of trauma to the nail such as broken nails or something like that and there didn't they didn't appear to be that way.”

Brinkman reported that she had spoken with Jennifer Mehavolin of the California testing laboratory, who had advised that based on the small amount of blood available on the thumbnail clippings, it did not “sound like the possibility of getting good results.” In Brinkman's opinion, high heat and humidity at the time of the murder also could have degraded the DNA. At the conclusion of the hearing the motion to continue for purposes of performing DNA testing was denied.

B. Trial

Venue in the case was changed to Knox County, Maine, where Dechaine was tried from March 6–18, 1989[,] with Superior Court Justice Carl O. Bradford presiding.

Testimony at trial revealed that John and Jennifer Henkel of Lewis Hill Road, Bowdoin, hired Cherry, a twelve-year-old girl who had just finished sixth grade, to babysit their ten-month-old infant on Wednesday, July 6, 1988. Cherry's mother, Debra Cherry Crossman, reminded her daughter the previous evening (as she always told her children when leaving) not to let anyone into the house or to inform any caller that she was alone. Only Cherry's mother, stepfather, Christopher Crossman, sister Hillary, great-grandmother and friend Julie Wagg knew she was babysitting that day. At noon Jennifer Henkel called home and spoke with Cherry, who said that she was feeding the baby and about to fix herself some lunch.

Holly Johnson, a neighbor across the street from the Henkels, testified that at approximately 1 p.m. she heard a vehicle slowing down at the Henkels' driveway and heard the Henkel dogs barking. About fifteen minutes later she saw a red Toyota truck heading northbound. She could not be sure that the two vehicles were the same or that the truck was in fact a Toyota.

Jennifer Henkel arrived home at about 3:20 p.m. She immediately noticed some papers[,] a little looseleaf notebook and a car-repair bill in the driveway and picked them up. She found both the garage-level and upper-level doors to the house, which she had left unlocked but closed, slightly ajar. Upon entering she saw the television set turned on, Cherry's eyeglasses folded neatly in a rocking chair and her blue-jean jacket, sneakers and socks in a little neat pile next to a couch. Nothing seemed disturbed, misplaced or damaged. The baby was asleep in her crib, but Cherry was nowhere to be found. After a half-hour of fruitless searching an increasingly frantic Jennifer Henkel called police. Following his arrival home from work at between 3:30 p.m. and 3:45 p.m. John Henkel noticed what he thought was an unusual tire impression in the driveway and set some rocks around it to preserve it.

Sometime between 4:20 p.m. and 4:49 p.m. Leo Scopino and Daniel Reed, deputy sheriffs with the Sagadahoc County Sheriff's Department, responded to Henkel's call. Jennifer Henkel showed them the car-repair bill and notebook she had found in the driveway. The car-repair bill had the name “Dennis Dechaine” on top of it and described damage to a 1981 Toyota pickup truck. Neither the Henkels nor Cherry's mother ever had heard of Dechaine.

Scopino and Reed found a phone-book listing for a Dennis Dechaine on Old Post Road in Bowdoinham and drove to the residence, arriving sometime after 5 p.m. Dechaine was not there, but the officers spoke to his wife. As the evening wore on, additional police officers became involved in a search for Cherry, Dechaine or Dechaine's vehicle. A command post was set up at the corner of Lewis Hill and Dead River roads.

Arthur Spaulding, whose house is set back in the woods about five or six hundred feet off of Dead River Road, testified that sometime that evening between 8 and 8:30, after he had started his generator, he saw a man in a blue polo shirt who appeared to be in his twenties walk past his window in the direction of Dead River Road.

At about 8:45 p.m. Helen Small Buttrick of Dead River Road, who was driving home with her husband Harry, spotted a man walking across the lawn of her mother's home, which was about seven hundred feet from the Buttricks' residence. The Buttricks stopped and asked the man, who turned out to be Dechaine, what he wanted. Dechaine told the Buttricks he had been fishing and could not find his truck. Harry Buttrick offered to help Dechaine find it following a brief stop at the Buttrick home. Helen Buttrick, who noticed nothing unusual about Dechaine's behavior, asked him where he lived. Dechaine responded that he lived in Yarmouth, was visiting in Bowdoinham “and sort of on the side he said I should have stayed there.” He also said that he had been in the woods for two hours and had

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