Maine’s highest court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of John D. Williams and the life sentence he is serving for the April 2018 murder of Somerset County Deputy Sheriff Cpl. Eugene Cole.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court also on Tuesday upheld the conviction of Kandee Weyland, who pleaded guilty to murdering her ex-husband in front of their two children in February 2017 but then attempted to rescind the guilty plea.

Williams shot and killed Cole and the officer was attempting to arrest Williams outside a home in Norridgewock. The shooting led to a prolonged search before Williams was arrested outside a remote cabin where he was hiding.

Williams argued that mistreatment by police during his arrest rendered a later confession inadmissible and that a re-enactment of the shooting during his trial by a state’s expert witness was prejudicial to the jury. Williams also argued that the trial judge did not properly weigh mitigating factors before sentencing Williams to life in prison.

But the justices were not persuaded by those arguments and found that although Williams was mistreated by arresting officers when they found him hiding in a remote cabin in the woods, his interrogation afterward involved different investigators who treated him with kindness and respect.

Prior to trial, a portion of the videotape of Williams’s confession was tossed out, after Williams requested he take a nap before the interrogation continued, a request that police denied. The effect at trial was negligible, the court found, because Williams had already confessed during the first portion of the interview.

Williams’s appeal argued that the trial court should have discarded the entire interview because police officers who found and arrested him stepped on his hand and punched him in the face multiple times while he was handcuffed. The officers also pulled his head by his hair to take a photo of his face — an image that was later leaked to the media, and showed a shirtless Williams in custody.

“Williams was not asked any questions about the crime during his arrest and transport out of the woods, the interrogation itself was conducted by two detectives who were not present in the woods during the arrest, the arresting officers had no further interaction with Williams after he was handed off to the detectives, and they were not present during the interrogation, which took place at the Waterville Police Department away from the scene of the arrest,” the court wrote. “Further, the interrogating detectives did not threaten, make any promises, or offer any inducements to Williams.”

“Thus, we conclude that the trial court did not err in determining that under the totality of the circumstances, the inappropriate force used during Williams’s arrest did not render involuntary his later confession and other statements to the detectives,” the justices wrote.

Williams also argued that his sentence was predetermined by the trial judge without the benefit of a fair sentencing process that did not give proper weight to Williams’s troubled childhood and history as a drug user. But the court found that the trial judge came to the sentence after earnest evaluation and that the outcome was not predetermined.

In the second case that was ruled on by the court Tuesday, Weyland pleaded guilty to murdering her ex-husband in front of their two children in February 2017 after the victim was awarded pruimary custody of the kids.

Weyland later attempted to withdraw that plea after the court accepted it, but before she was sentenced. She also argued that the trial court erred when it did not permit her to pursue a defense of actual innocence because she was experiencing an abnormal condition of the mind and that the trial court misapplied sentencing principles before arriving at a 32-year sentence.

The justice was not swayed by Weyland’s arguments and found that although she expressed a desire to go to trial rather than take a plea as early as 22 days after she entered the guilty plea, the lower court did not make an error in judgment when it found that Weyland did not show enough evidence that she was not in a sound state of mind and therefore not responsible for her actions.

The court also found that Weyland’s statements before the murder and her actions that day indicate she was aware of her actions and intentions and was therefore culpable for the murder.

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