Opinion ID: 201898
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Defense Investigation

Text: 15 Realizing that he was a suspect, Dugas hired attorney Ray Raimo to represent him. Raimo was an experienced criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, though this was apparently his first arson case. On December 15, 1998 — less than two months after the fire — a state grand jury indicted Dugas on one count of arson. 16 Like most attorneys, Raimo had no training in fire investigation; his scientific background consists of high school chemistry and physics. 3 As part of his pretrial investigation, Raimo spoke to Donaldson (the Nashua fire inspector), Boudreau (the state forensic chemist), Eddy (the private fire investigator), and Johnson (the electrical fire investigator), and found all of them to be credible and formidable witnesses. He also walked through the scene, and, in his lay opinion, concluded that the physical evidence was consistent with the state's expert testimony. He realized that the impression a layman might get from the scene was it must be arson. 17 Raimo did not, however, conclude that the not arson line of defense lacked merit. While he noted that it seemed like the State had some fairly decent testimony, he recognized that [t]heir expert testimony ... conflicted a bit, and we thought we could use that. He discussed the strengths of the state's experts with fellow defense attorneys (in what he described as casual discussions with friends) and recalls discussing the idea that we were going to need somebody ... who was at least as well qualified as the state's experts to testify for the defense. He read some materials on arson (he could not recall the exact sources) and admitted that he did not understand the basic terminology or techniques of arson investigation. Viewing the not arson defense as a challenge, Raimo also decided that we weren't going to just rest on the defense it wasn't arson, and chose to also pursue the defense that, if the fire was arson, another person caused it. 18 Raimo followed up leads and issues pertaining to the defense that another person was responsible for the fire. Raimo did not, however, conduct further investigation into the not arson defense. Despite his earlier consideration of the possibility, Raimo did not hire an expert to testify for the defense about the state's evidence on arson. He did not consult an expert in preparing for his cross-examination of the state's arson experts. Nor did he conduct the research required to understand the principles of arson investigation on his own. Instead, in the end, his investigation of the arson issue consisted of his interviews with the state's experts, his reading of some materials about arson, his assessment of the experts' testimony and the fire scene based on his own inadequate understanding of arson forensics, and the advice about cross-examination that he gleaned from his casual discussions with other defense attorneys.