According to Press Herald editor Greg Kesich (commentary, “It is time for Dechaine’s Trial & Error champions to lay his case to rest,” July 23), retired ATF agent Jim Moore “uses the medical examiner’s testimony to make his own time-of-death calculation, which he says clears (Dennis) Dechaine because Cherry would have still been alive when he was taken into custody.”

In fact, if one does the math, assistant state medical examiner Ronald Roy’s initial testimony, based on standard forensic science, also placed Sarah’s death after Dechaine’s whereabouts were known. More recently, renowned forensic pathologists Drs. Cyril Wecht and Walter Hofman, having studied the time-of-death evidence, concluded that Dechaine could not have killed Sarah.

Although the post-conviction DNA statute calls for the consideration of “all the evidence in the case,old and new,” the trial judge and the Law Court has chosen not to allow a jury to consider the affidavits of Wecht and Hofman, nor contemporaneous notes by detectives that undermine their testimony that Dechaine confessed. Kesich wants Trial & Error to disappear; we will happily comply when Dechaine is given a retrial in which a jury hears all of the evidence

William Bunting

Whitefield