Public Defense, Post-Conviction, and The Fatal “Finality” of Maine’s Legal System

The greatest crime of all in a civilized society is an unjust conviction. It is truly a scandal that reflects unfavorably on all participants in the criminal justice system.

— The New York Appellate Division, First Department,

People v. Ramos, 1994.

Sketch of a seated man (c. 1901 - 1907) by Franz Kafka

There’s a dark story unfolding in the state of Maine. Many Mainers know something about it, but few appreciate its full extent. Lots of people in our state have heard of Dennis Dechaine, the young farmer who was arrested in the 1980s for the horrific torture and murder of a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Cherry. They may also have heard that a vocal group of people believes Dechaine is innocent and that the life sentence he continues to serve is a terrible miscarriage of justice. But there’s much more to the story than this. Dennis Dechaine is just one face of a tragedy that is deep and wide enough to encompass not just the state of Maine but the entire country.

Before we begin it is imperative that it be clearly understood that nothing that follows in this article should be read to in any way diminish ignore or separate the fact that a despicable, unspeakable crime and act of violence was perpetrated on an innocent, wonderful child with her whole life ahead of her or of the unimaginable pain and anguish her parents and family and community have endured since. Sexual assault, especially against children, is an abomination and the act of murder goes beyond the taking of a single life, it is nothing less than an interruption of the Divine plan of creation. Who would this child become? Whose lives would she have enriched? How would those people benefit society? What new life would have been begotten or nurtured through her and what would they have contributed to the common good? Those questions will never be answered and we will never know. So this crime is by no means made less consequential by seeking the truth about who committed it. In fact, that quest for the truth is necessary for society to provide closure to the victim and her loved ones.

In July of 1988, during a summer that was one of the hottest and driest on record in Maine, police in the rural town of Bowdoin received a mother’s call that the 12-year-old babysitter she’d hired had disappeared, leaving her child alone. Bowdoin is a farm town in the south of the state and had a population of just around 2,000 people at the time. It wasn’t a place where the police were used to dealing with crimes of violence. Probably, they thought that the girl had just wandered off and would turn up soon. But when they arrived at the house, another explanation came into view. In the driveway, they found a farm notebook and a receipt bearing the name of Dennis Dechaine. 

That same night, Dechaine, a 30-year-old farmer and Christmas-wreath seller, emerged from the woods and flagged down a passing car containing an elderly couple named Buttrick. He told them he had wandered from his truck and gotten lost, and they drove around looking for the truck. After about an hour, they were stopped by a police car. According to Dechaine, he eagerly approached the police asking for help. When the police realized who he was, they detained him. He wouldn’t leave the police car for eight hours. Finally, at four in the morning, he was returned to his farm and his wife, who hadn’t known his whereabouts since he had left that afternoon. Two days later, Sarah Cherry was found buried above ground under a pile of dirt in the Bowdoin woods. Dechaine’s truck was less than 300 feet away. A scarf belonging to Dechaine was wrapped around her throat, and her wrists were tied with rope from Dechaine’s truck. The police immediately arrested Dechaine. With the amount of circumstantial evidence against him, it is no surprise that, despite his plea of innocence, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

But from the beginning, there was a group of people in Maine who thought something had gone terribly wrong in the rush to punish Dechaine for Cherry’s murder. First, there was the fact that Dechaine had no record of violence in his past. All who knew him saw him as a good community member and friend. Then there was his plea at the time of his arrest to have the crime scene tested for DNA, then a new technology. Would someone who knew they were guilty have asked for this? Although Dechaine asked for DNA testing early in the case, the request was denied. There was also the fact that a search dog detected no trace of Cherry ever having been in Dechaine’s truck. That canine report, however, was withheld from the defense and was not discovered until years later, after litigation forced the Attorney General’s Office to open its files. There was the fact of Cherry’s rigor mortis, which suggested she had been killed at 2 a.m. at the earliest, when Dechaine was sitting in a police car. And wasn’t the placement of two items with Dechaine’s name on them in the driveway just a little too perfect? Dechaine’s narrative was that he had been framed. He had been in the woods, not fishing as he had originally claimed, but shooting amphetamine. While in the woods, he had gotten lost. During this time, someone had broken into his truck, stolen the items, kidnapped and killed Cherry, and then buried her near the truck. It sounded improbable, but it also seemed improbable that Dechaine could have done what he was accused of, given the contradictory evidence.

Then in 2021, when Dechaine had been in prison for 35 years, a Judge finally granted his request for DNA testing. The testing was paid for with money raised by Dechaine’s many supporters in Maine and throughout the world. The test showed that the blood under Cherry’s fingernails and DNA traces on the scarf wrapped around her neck belonged neither to her nor to Dechaine, but to an “unknown male.” Dechaine’s supporters were exuberant. He got a new lawyer, a highly regarded veteran Maine attorney named John Nale, who was so appalled by the injustice of Dechaine’s case that he took the case on a pro bono basis. Previous attorneys had been paid through donated funds, but those funds have since been depleted. Over the years, more than $1 million was donated to support Dechaine’s legal fight. John is a true example of what we expect our lawyers to be: dedicated, qualified, and willing to confront the system in difficult circumstances like this. In April of 2024, Nale and Dechaine appeared before Maine Superior Court Justice Bruce Mallonee to argue for a retrial, taking into account the new evidence. In January of 2025, the request was denied. It was Dechaine’s fourth attempt at a retrial. He appealed the denial in February. 

Mallonee’s denial of Dechaine’s request might be surprising to some, given the strength of the new DNA evidence. But it won’t surprise anyone who knows the Maine justice system. A 2019 study found Maine had one of the very lowest exoneration rates in the country, .22 per 100 thousand residents, as compared to 1.26 and 1.35 for famously draconian Texas and Louisiana. Maine has had only four felony convictions overturned in its history as a state. Despite Maine’s reputation as a liberal state, it actually has one of the most hidebound and harsh justice systems in the country. 

Maine’s lack of a real public defense system matters even in a case like Dechaine’s, where he was not simply abandoned without counsel. Dechaine has had private lawyers at different stages of his case, including lawyers who fought hard for DNA testing and post-conviction review. But that is part of the problem, not an answer to it. A functioning defense system is not just a last-minute lawyer for a person in crisis. It is an institution. It develops expertise, trains lawyers, preserves issues, challenges misconduct, builds records, and creates the appellate case law that future defendants rely on. Without that structure, even serious constitutional questions can be missed, waived, or left undeveloped for decades. As the Supreme Court stated in U.S. v. Cronic, "Of all the rights that an accused person has, the right to be represented by counsel is by far the most pervasive for it affects his ability to assert any other rights he may have."

Maine has essentially ignored the mandate of Gideon v. Wainright, the landmark decision that guaranteed every person accused of a crime the right to conflict free counsel and is the only state in the country that has never established or maintained a formal statewide public defense system. And even as the Maine’s haphazard private assigned counsel, or “lawyer of the day” system has been found to be unconstitutional, the Maine Legislature has treated this structural Sixth Amendment right more like a nuisance than the constitutional imperative, and this past session had to be pressured into appropriating about thirteen million dollars, the bare minimum necessary to maintain what semblance of a public defense system exists now (you can read my testimony in favor of the appropriations bill here.) And to make matters worse, many Mainers do not even seem to be aware of the crisis, even though roughly eighty-percent of people accused of a crime in the state cannot afford to retain private defense counsel and have to rely on the state’s disjointed  “lawyer of the day” system.

As a result, prosecutors face weaker and less consistent opposition, and decades of convictions go unchallenged in ways that damage the entire legal system. Consistent, aggressive challenges to unjust legal decisions and prosecutorial misconduct are the foundation of a fair system. Cases that emerge from these challenges create precedents that become grounds for further challenges. When the public defense bar is too thin, too underfunded, or too fragmented to bring those challenges regularly, the law itself stops developing. Jurisprudence becomes stunted. Bad rulings sit undisturbed. Questions that should have been tested years earlier remain unresolved until they are procedurally barred.

In other states, the discovery of fresh DNA evidence at a crime scene would have rung alarm bells that the legal system had failed. In Maine, the evidence was scornfully cast aside by a judge used to operating in a system where convictions are rarely seriously disturbed. Dechaine’s case is extraordinary in its facts, but the structural weakness it exposes is ordinary: without a strong defense system, even people with real claims, public attention, and private counsel can find themselves trapped in a process designed more for finality than for truth.

The state of Maine is not eager to ease the process of post-conviction review. The Maine State Supreme Court has ruled that “The need for finality and for the preservation of the integrity of criminal judgments causes us to regard a motion for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence with disfavor." The disfavor towards appeals is also reflected in extremely strict rules, such as requiring an appeal on the ground of new evidence to be submitted within one year of when the evidence could have been discovered with “due diligence,” and considering any grounds for relief not raised in a defendant’s first post-conviction-review motion to be permanently waived. Appealing a denial of a PCR motion requires submitting a new motion to the Law Court that is almost always dismissed out of hand. Maine law does allow indigent petitioners to request appointed counsel in post-conviction review, but that formal protection does not solve the larger problem. These lawyers are often overworked, under-resourced, and forced to litigate complex claims against experienced state prosecutors inside a system already tilted toward finality. Post-conviction review requires investigation, access to records, expert assistance, legal research, and time. Without those things, appointed counsel exists more in theory than in practice. These rules are designed to practically guarantee that no one can get a conviction reviewed, even with capable counsel. Without meaningful legal assistance, the situation is truly hopeless.

Dechaine’s case is not an isolated one. Given Maine’s incredibly low rate of exoneration, there are undoubtedly other people with strong claims to innocence stuck in the state’s prison system. The case of Foster Bates shows how the same machinery of finality can operate even when new evidence emerges.

In 1994, Foster Bates, of South Portland, was convicted of raping and murdering his neighbor, Tammy Dickinson. He was convicted largely on the basis of semen found at the scene. Then, in 2014, DNA testing on a sock found in Dickinson’s mouth excluded Bates. That same year, a woman reached out to Bates’s legal team to say that her brother-in-law had confessed to the murder. At Bates’s appeal hearing in 2016, a neighbor testified that she had seen him go into Dickinson’s apartment on the night of the murder, apparently have sex with her, and then leave while she was still alive and well. All this was not enough for a new trial. Bates continues to serve a life sentence. It is difficult to imagine what evidence would be enough to secure a retrial once someone has been convicted in the state of Maine.

 And as if all of this was not bad enough there is yet another state imposed barrier facing incarcerated people trying to prove their innocence: the prison law library at Maine State Prison has been effectively inaccessible to resident pro se litigants for several years, this is addition to having meaningful access to counsel repeatedly delayed or denied and the pre-trail and trial stages of the proceedings against them. This is not a small administrative problem. For someone trying to challenge a conviction from inside prison, access to legal materials and communication with counsel can be the difference between preserving a claim and losing it forever.

The law recognizes this in principle. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that prisoners cannot be denied meaningful access to the courts, and that states must provide either adequate law libraries or adequate legal assistance to allow incarcerated people to challenge their convictions and conditions of confinement. But in practice, those rights become hollow when prison law libraries are unavailable, legal materials are inaccessible, and communication with counsel is delayed or obstructed (see Bounds v. Smith and Lewis v. Casey). But once again, Maine officials simply ignore even this very basic right and need. 

This is where Bates’s case and Dechaine’s case meet. Both show how a person can present serious questions about guilt, new evidence, or constitutional error, and still find every door narrowed by procedure. At the state level, Maine’s post-conviction system is built around finality. At the federal level, the path is no easier.

Under current law, Dechaine’s prospects for getting relief in the federal courts are extremely limited. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which slashed state prisoners’ access to federal habeas corpus to the bone. A habeas corpus petition is simply a request for a federal court to review the constitutionality of a state court conviction. Habeas corpus, meaning “produce the body,” is a sacred legal protection going back to the Magna Carta, the absolute safeguard against wrongful imprisonment. Sadly, this last resort and legal remedy for wrongful imprisonment is no longer fully intact in the United States.

Now, as a result of this bipartisan evisceration of the sacred writ, a successive or additional petition, such as the one Attorney Nale applied to the court for on behalf of Dennis Dechaine this past January and which is now pending decision, can only be submitted if it contains clear and convincing proof of certain factual and legal exceptions to the strict procedural bars imposed by AEDPA. If a prisoner simply wants to make the case that existing evidence was not sufficiently evaluated in a previous writ, the chances of success are very slight. They must first receive permission from a panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before even filing their writ. This permission is very rarely granted. Even on the first writ, habeas corpus after AEDPA is not what it once was. Under AEDPA, as in the state of Maine, there is a strict one-year time bar for requesting a conviction review based on new evidence. AEDPA strictly codified the policy that state remedies must be exhausted before federal appeal, even when the obstacles to pursuing state remedies are practically insurmountable, or deliberately created by imposed state procedural strictures, as in Dechaine’s case. Most significantly, under AEDPA, the federal court explicitly assumes that the state court’s ruling is correct unless overwhelming evidence to the contrary is provided. Before AEDPA, a habeas corpus filing secured a de novo review, meaning that a federal judge looked at the case anew with no presumption in favor of the convicting court. In essence, AEDPA made the post-conviction process at the federal level much like what it is in Maine: overwhelmingly in favor of the convicting court and overwhelmingly against the defendant.

Dechaine’s record of attempts at securing habeas corpus relief shows the effects of AEDPA. He has tried three times to secure a federal review of his case: once in 2000, once in 2016, and now in 2026. His 2000 writ was rejected because he was found not to have exhausted his options at the state level, even though his earlier petition for state post-conviction review was thrown out without being heard. In the response to his 2016 writ, the court wrote, “AEDPA (and its statute of limitations) went into effect in April 1996 and the one year grace period expired in 1997. Petitioner became aware of the factual predicate underlying most of the grounds alleged in the instant application by his own admission by 2006, yet he did not file this application until 2016.”

In January 2026, Dechaine filed a motion in the First Circuit seeking authorization to file a second or successive habeas petition on a new ground: the original prosecutor’s allegedly unconstitutional closing argument, in which he suggested that the lack of evidence tying Dechaine to the crime was simply a reflection of God’s mysterious will. It remains to be seen how this motion will be received. If the past is any indication, the court may find a procedural reason not to reach the heart of the claim. It is our fervent hope that the panel will be persuaded by Attorney Nale’s clear and convincing pleading, that the court will fulfill its true role as guardian of the Constitution, and that it will use whatever legal and equitable means are at its disposal to open the door to justice for Dennis Dechaine.

AEDPA’s “reforms” have deadly consequences. One of the best-known casualties of AEDPA is Troy Davis of Georgia. In 2011, at 10:53 on September 21st, Troy Davis uttered his last words: “All I can ask is that each of you look deeper into this case, so that you really will finally see the truth. I ask my family and friends that you all continue to pray, that you all continue to forgive. Continue to fight this fight. For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on all of your souls. God bless you all.” Davis had been convicted of murdering an off-duty police officer in 1989. Nine witnesses claimed they saw him pull the trigger, but seven later recanted their testimony. Public figures from Jimmy Carter to the Pope took up Davis’s cause, but it was to no avail. His second habeas corpus petition was found not to meet the AEDPA requirements by the Court of Appeals. In a dissenting view, Judge Rosemary Barkett stated, “AEDPA cannot possibly be applied when to do so would offend the Constitution and the fundamental concept of justice that an innocent man should not be executed.” This is a view most would agree with, but it is not the one currently upheld by our legal system. Meeting the nearly impossible requirements of the law takes precedence over incontrovertible proof of actual and factual innocence.

And the Clinton Administration and its bipartisan congressional collaborators did not start there. In 1995, a year before AEDPA, Clinton signed into law the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act. This prelude to AEDPA severely restricts a state prisoner’s access to sue in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the Reconstruction-era civil rights law designed to prevent the undoing of emancipation and guarantee liberty to emancipated slaves. The authors of the bill, and the president who signed it into law, knew exactly what they were doing. They anticipated that when their plan to severely restrict habeas corpus access was accomplished, state prisoners could still try to litigate constitutional violations directly through civil rights laws, and so they imposed severe restrictions on a state prisoner’s access to Article III courts. Combine this with a Supreme Court decision in a case called Heck v. Humphrey, which held that where a state prisoner has been time-barred from filing habeas corpus and the claims in their civil rights litigation “implicate” a standing conviction, they are barred from bringing an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

Add to this that a state prisoner is not entitled to counsel in a habeas proceeding, except in a capital offense case, so they have to navigate these procedural landmines themselves, from a prison law library (that does not exist at Maine State Prison), unassisted and without the education or the resources to do so.

Dechaine’s case, which remains infamous in Maine, is just one more reminder of a frightening truth. If you are convicted of a crime you didn’t commit in America, the system will do everything it can to prevent you from getting justice. States treat these convictions as if they are valuable assets and fully resist disturbing them, whether they secured them by fair or foul means. They tell us that “finality” is more important than the truth, that “conservation of judicial resources” is more important than forever consigning innocent people to the fate of prison, and that blind presumptions of the validity of state court convictions have priority over justice, fairness, and liberty.

Maine is a beautiful state with good, strong people and values, progressive in most respects, but the state of its criminal legal system is dire. Dennis Dechaine’s case is among the most tragic and cries out for justice. It is a bar exam of facts and issues that, once understood, casts a dark light on the Maine system. Somewhere out there is a person who committed this unspeakable crime against an innocent child and has never been held accountable. When states go to extremes to secure “the finality of convictions,” and when judges, legislators, and prosecutors ignore proof of innocence, prosecutorial misconduct, and direct constitutional violations, everyone loses, including victims and their loved ones. This is not justice, and it is not closure. It is camouflage. 

On Law Day this past month, members of the Maine bar, former jurists, faculty and students, and members of the broader community gathered in Lincoln Park in Portland to protest attacks on the rule of law and due process by the administration in Washington. That protest was right, necessary, and good to see. They were there to speak out on national issues, but we have far more ability, and responsibility, to address the injustices in our own state. Justice begins at home.

There is a story in the Old Testament about King David and the Prophet Nathan. After David had an affair with Bathsheba and secretly orchestrated the death of her husband, Nathan told him a story about a powerful man who committed a grave injustice against someone with far less power. David was outraged and demanded to know the man’s name. Nathan answered: “That man is you.”

So let Maine’s justice system become a true reflection of the state’s independent character, fair-minded people, and long traditions of civic responsibility. Let us make the criminal legal system worthy of the place it serves: as honest as its people, as strong as its coastline, and as humane as the values Mainers claim as their own. As the system stands today, there is a deep disconnect.