Congratulations to Maine’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, recently cited as one of the country’s best (May 8). Thirty years ago, however, this was not the case.

In the 1989 trial of Dennis Dechaine, the testimony of Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Ronald Roy was critical to the state’s theory of the crime, and to Dechaine’s conviction. Given that Dechaine will now likely die in prison, it is fair to ask if the present chief medical examiner would affirm Roy’s conclusions, and dispute the findings of the renowned forensic pathologists Dr. Walter Hofman (now deceased) and Dr. Cyril Wecht, who, along with other pathologists, concluded that Sarah Cherry died after Dennis Dechaine had been detained by the police.

Former Deputy Attorney General William Stokes once read to me the conclusion of a retired medical examiner who agreed with Roy. Stokes did not read where she repeatedly stated that the body was buried in cool earth. In fact, the body was not buried, and there was a heat wave.

Having read the report, I called Stokes on his omission, whereby he stated that time-of-death science was “not a real science anyway.” Yet a few months later he read the same flawed conclusion to a friend of mine.

Statutes limiting post-conviction reviews, and rulings by Superior Court Justice Carl O. Bradford, have prevented the critical time-of-death issue in the Dechaine case from being re-examined. When the state and the courts act to suppress powerful exculpatory scientific evidence, they are demonstrating that other considerations outweigh the search for the truth. Consider the tactics recently employed by the attorney general’s office to thwart efforts to exonerate Tony Sanborn, thus relieving the state from having to admit to errors and, in effect, protecting the actual murderer of Jessica Briggs from prosecution.

William Bunting

Whitefield


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