Trial and Error

Dec 8, 2010

http://www.bangordailynews.com/story/Opinion/Dec-8-Letters-to-the-Editor,160919?ref=mostReadBox

BANGOR DAILY NEWS

Dechaine questions
Since January 1989, when Dennis Dechaine was denied his request for DNA testing on the evidence surrounding the gruesome death of Sarah Cherry, this case has been massively tilted in the state’s favor.

In the 22 years hence, new evidence has been unearthed and-or substantiated that both the state and the court do not want considered in new proceeding that surely should result in a new trial.

The evidence, some sealed in the state’s lockboxes for years, includes perjury on the part of testifying police officers; officers who were allegedly reading from their notes at the first trial, but when those notes were finally unsealed we learned they said something very different than what the jury heard as revealed in trial transcript.

The time of death questions raised are clearly the most evocative, but so are the highly improbable mathematically statistics of Dechaine’s identifiable assets being discovered at and near the crime scene as they were.

Why did the state incinerate evidence; hairs found on Sarah’s battered body that would have exonerated Dechaine and perhaps identified her killer? We now know, the male DNA found under her thumbnail did not belong to Dechaine.

Why is the state so reticent to have all the facts on the table at the same time? Why does it want a potentially innocent man to remain in prison for life for a crime a massive amount of evidence says he did not commit?

Dechaine is not looking for a get-out-of-jail free card, he is seeking a new fair trial.

Dennis Curley
Caribou