Trial and Error

Jul 11, 2011

In prisoner Dennis Dechaine’s latest bid for a new trial, the key piece of evidence is actually old news.

Accompanied by his attorney Steve Peterson, Dennis Dechaine listens to a reporter’s questions during an interview at the Maine State Prison in Warren on March 22. With a new appeal more than two decades after his conviction in the death of Sarah Cherry, no other case has been litigated in Maine’s court system for so long.

March 2010 photo by Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Thomas Connolly, the Portland lawyer who represented Dennis Dechaine at his 1989 trial, says he regrets not pushing harder for pretrial DNA testing. “I wasn’t hanging my hat on the DNA at the time,” Connolly said this spring. “It was only after the verdict that I realized the enormity of it.’

December 2006 file photo/The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram

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It is a fragment of unidentified male DNA, extracted by scientists in 1994 from a thumbnail clipping of 12-year-old murder victim Sarah Cherry.

Dechaine was convicted of the murder in 1989 and is serving a life sentence. He says he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that another man set him up.

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By Trevor Maxwell 

Staff Writer

July 11 2010