In September, a Somerset County judge took the unusual step of ruling that the office of District Attorney Maeghan Maloney engaged in “bad faith” when it failed to hand over evidence to a defendant in a drug case.

The case had been pending for more than a year against Derek Sicard, 33, of Ludlow, Massachusetts. But Sicard had yet to receive all the evidence — called discovery — that he and his attorney needed to prepare his defense, Judge Erika Bristol wrote in a Sept. 12 ruling. 

“At hearing, the State had no update as to what was in its possession, what had been requested or provided, and what had not been requested or provided,” she wrote. “The Court, therefore, has no alternative than to find bad faith on the part of the State.” 

The ruling was a rare rebuke for something that Maine criminal defense attorneys have long argued happens too often: prosecutors failing to turn over all the evidence to which a defendant is entitled or not doing so in a timely manner.

The ruling also comes as prosecutors say their offices are understaffed and overwhelmed by increasingly complex cases, driven by greater volumes of digital evidence and expanded responsibilities.

The more prosecutors are overworked, the more likely they are to make errors, including discovery violations, legal scholars have argued, harming defendants and the integrity of the criminal justice system.

Maloney blamed the “bad faith” finding on high caseloads in her office and a prosecutor who was unfamiliar with the case having to cover for another. 

“Unfortunately, due to heavy caseloads of over 300 active cases per prosecutor, the prosecutor handling the case was occupied in a different courtroom, and a prosecutor not familiar with the case had to cover the hearing,” Maloney wrote in an email.

Defense attorneys, however, argue prosecutors have helped put themselves in this position. Elected district attorneys and their offices are accountable only to voters and have wide latitude to not bring charges, to dismiss cases or to strike plea deals to ensure manageable caseloads, they said. 

Sicard’s attorney, Julia Lodsin, noted that her client is facing extremely serious charges. He was indicted by a grand jury on six counts of aggravated trafficking in scheduled drugs, including cocaine and fentanyl, each of which is punishable by up to 30 years in prison. 

“If the DA doesn’t believe in a fair trial when it’s a serious case, how important does she think a fair trial is in a less serious case?” asked Lodsin, a former prosecutor in Maloney’s office. “It shows disregard for the citizens of Somerset and Kennebec counties that their DA is so accepting of this type of prosecutorial conduct.”

Maloney’s office sits at the center of the issue. Three recent cases involving her office show how prosecutors’ failure to identify and turn over discovery can cause cases to languish and, in some instances, prompt sanctions that may make them harder to prosecute.

Not only did her office receive the rare rebuke of “bad faith” in Somerset County in September, but last month the Maine Supreme Judicial Court also heard oral arguments in a different case in which her office was found to have violated discovery rules. 

The high court heard an appeal of a drug trafficking conviction in which Maloney’s office failed to hand over records for six months that showed the lead officer and primary witness in the case had been disciplined six times by the Augusta Police Department. The lower court judge wrote that the prosecution committed a “serious” and “completely unacceptable” discovery violation. 

In a reply, Maloney blamed the delay on an email chain that accidentally left off the Augusta police officer responsible for sending the records to the defense. After prosecutors were informed that the records had not been handed over, they reached out to the Augusta Police Department to fix the error, and the defense received the records the next day, she pointed out.

“It is important to note that the delay in providing the records was inadvertent,” she wrote.

As a remedy, the judge excluded the officer’s eyewitness testimony; she also excluded the defendant’s cell phone as evidence.

Appellate attorney Rory McNamara told the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that it should vacate the conviction and “draw the line” to hold prosecutors and the state accountable. 

“This court is frequently seeing discovery problems because prosecutors and the bodies that under-resource them remain untouched by meaningful consequences,” McNamara wrote.

“Respectfully, this is no time for half-measures,” he wrote. “Until Maine courts hold the State to account for its slipshod discovery practices, our courts and all persons necessitating their services will continue to suffer.” 

‘Shouldn’t there be a resolution?’

The Maine court system doesn’t track discovery violations, so it’s unclear how many have been found statewide, whether they are becoming more frequent or if Maloney’s office has committed more than the other seven district attorneys offices in Maine. Defense attorneys argue that Maloney’s office is not the only one failing to meet its discovery obligations. 

Part of the issue is that prosecutors often say they are sharing all the evidence they have, while defense attorneys — and, in some cases, judges — say it’s the prosecution’s responsibility to collect evidence from outside sources, such as law enforcement agencies and Maine’s crime laboratory. 

Although Maloney blamed the Somerset discovery violation on a prosecutor unfamiliar with the case covering a hearing, Sicard’s attorney, Lodsin, didn’t think a different prosecutor would have made a difference. 

That’s because Lodsin still hadn’t received the discovery as of Nov. 5, she said, and her inquiries about its status have gone unanswered. The judge had ordered Maloney’s office to provide police reports, witness statements, video and audio recordings of witness interviews, lab information and more by Sept. 24.

Maloney said that Lodsin has everything “in the DA’s file.” 

“The defense attorney wants information we do not have,” Maloney said, citing the fact that the drug testing laboratory is “severely backlogged.”

A former prosecutor, Lodsin is sympathetic to workload issues, she said, but prosecutors should not let cases linger and make defendants and victims wait in limbo. 

“I really think prosecutorial discretion plays a huge role in these caseloads,” Lodsin said. “If you want justice, if you want to have an effect on the community, shouldn’t there be a resolution? This lingering — who does that help?”

The state is experiencing an indigent legal defense crisis at a time when crime has declined and district attorneys are filing fewer criminal cases. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2024, annual cases statewide fell nearly 40%, according to court data.

Even though case numbers have fallen, prosecutors’ duties have grown, driven in part by the growing volume of digital evidence in most cases. Prosecutors and defense attorneys alike must review voluminous camera footage, text messages, social media posts and cell phone tracking data, all of which didn’t exist or were part of fewer cases in years past. 

The number of pending cases — that is, the case backlog — has grown since before the pandemic. Between October 2019 and October 2025, the number of statewide pending criminal cases increased 27%, according to court data. Out of the total, pending misdemeanors were up 19%; pending felonies were up 53%.

“Our offices are underwater,” said Chris Almy, the district attorney for Penobscot and Piscataquis counties. “We don’t have enough people, and we are bound to make mistakes.”

Prosecutors have also been given additional responsibilities by the Maine Legislature in recent years but not the corresponding additional resources, said Shira Burns, executive director of the Maine Prosecutors Association. That includes coordinating with child advocacy centers in child sexual abuse cases and police in “yellow-flag” gun removal proceedings. 

Also new in recent years is that prosecutor positions go unfilled, Burns said. 

“Prosecutors used to be fully staffed at all times,” Burns said, noting that when positions came open, applications from qualified candidates quickly followed. “Now there are many prosecutor positions open all the time with the inability to fill them.” 

There are no national standards for how many cases prosecutors can be assigned and still be effective. Groups like the Prosecutors’ Center for Excellence caution against developing one-size-fits-all standards, or comparing caseloads across jurisdictions, citing vast differences in how prosecutors’ offices are organized.

However, legal experts say that excessive prosecutor caseloads can harm both defendants and victims. One often-cited law review article notes that excessive caseloads can “lead prosecutors to run afoul of their constitutional obligations.”

Battles over discovery, even when they don’t lead to violation rulings and sanctions from the bench, can add stress to an already buckling system. When prosecutors fail to turn over evidence in a timely manner or at all, defense attorneys have to fight for the evidence they believe they are owed. Cases are stalled and prolonged, with additional motions and rulings. Meanwhile new cases continue to arrive, adding to a criminal case backlog.  

Frayla Tarpinian, the new executive director of the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services and a former prosecutor in Maloney’s office, called the cycle “a very big negative feedback loop.” 

“Any delay in our resolution of the case is pernicious, and it backlogs and just completely creates a bottleneck or a log jam for the whole system,” Tarpinian said.

‘In an interesting twist’

Defense attorney Daniel Feldman believes Maloney’s office failed to fulfill its constitutional obligation in a 2023 case by not providing records relating to the police officer who investigated his client. The lack of disclosure prompted a judge to order a new trial.

In the original case, a jury convicted Garrett Toothaker, 38, of Waterville, of operating under the influence, criminal mischief and failure to stop. But after it concluded, Feldman heard from another lawyer who said he should make a public records request for discipline records from the Waterville Police Department.

The records showed an officer who Feldman argued had mishandled a lab test had previously been disciplined for shooting off confiscated fireworks. The judge wrote the discipline “directly overlaps” with the defense’s argument at trial, and ordered a new one. 

In the order for a new trial, the judge cited the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case Giglio v. United States, which established that prosecutors must hand over records before trial that could be used to impeach the credibility of witnesses, such as police officers, by calling into question their truthfulness or possible bias.

The judge did not rule that there was a discovery violation, instead finding that Maloney’s office was “not aware of this evidence until it was provided by the Defense after trial.” 

Maloney’s office, like others in Maine, distributes annual questionnaires to local law enforcement to identify potential Giglio material. But Maloney said the process had not identified the records. 

“In an interesting twist, the defense attorney had the Brady/Giglio information before the State,” she wrote in an email, citing another related Supreme Court case.

However, Feldman said the prosecution has an obligation to identify Giglio material in police department personnel files and turn it over before trial, an assertion also backed by legal experts.

Ultimately, instead of a new trial, Feldman’s client reached a deal in which he pleaded guilty to only the charge of failure to stop. 

“My client would have gotten the same or an even better deal much earlier on and with less cost to the system as a whole — the taxpayers specifically — had the relevant information been disclosed as required,” Feldman wrote in an email.

‘It really shakes my confidence’

While prosecutors may point out the difficulties involved in getting all relevant police discipline records in their jurisdictions, a recent case in Kennebec County involved a legal fight over a letter Maloney wrote that was critical of a Maine State Police trooper.

Last year, a trooper unnecessarily handcuffed an arson suspect in Readfield and took him to the ground, alarming officers from other agencies at the scene. The incident prompted Maloney to write a letter to the state police, stating that Trooper Hunter Belanger’s actions had jeopardized the prosecution of the case. 

Despite writing that Belanger’s actions had hindered her “ability to prosecute any criminal conduct arising from this incident,” Maloney’s office kept the letter out of the hands of the defendant’s attorney for months, court records show. 

McLaughlin’s attorney, public defender Hillary Knight, only learned of the existence of Maloney’s letter from another attorney, she said in an interview. 

Maloney’s office “failed to respond” to Knight’s requests for the letter, she wrote in court filings, prompting her to file a motion for discovery with the court on April 29.

Maloney didn’t believe the letter was discoverable because it didn’t contain findings, “only my opinion regarding the arrest,” she said. But she turned over the letter to the court for the judge to decide, she told The Maine Monitor. 

On June 27, Justice Daniel Mitchell ruled the letter was discoverable and instructed the prosecution to give it to the defense, though he did not set a deadline.

That same day, Maloney’s office requested that the letter be placed under a protective order, keeping it hidden from public court records — a standard practice for potentially embarrassing personnel records. In July, Mitchell granted the request. But Maloney’s office still didn’t hand over the letter to the defense.

On Aug. 27, more than a month after the judge’s order, a different judge handed a copy of the letter to Knight from the bench, she wrote in court filings. The letter remained confidential, but it was later referenced as part of a separate lawsuit involving Belanger. The Bangor Daily News then obtained a copy of the letter. 

Knight said she believes Maloney’s office should have provided the letter even without her asking, and the fight over its disclosure worries her. 

“The process of trying to obtain this letter and the reaction that I got, the sort of way I was treated as I was asking for it and seeking it, is very troubling,” Knight said. “It really shakes my confidence that I’m being provided with everything I’m supposed to be in every case.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.