Court Opinion

ID: 9757804
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 22:59:46.842544+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:44.548105
License: Public Domain

*1026CARTER, Justice,
with whom ROBERTS, Justice, joins, dissenting.
I cannot agree that the court’s dual error in (1) failing to rule promptly on McKenna’s motion for a judgment of acquittal at the close of the State’s case-in-chief, 460 A.2d 1023 and (2) denying White’s motion to reopen to call McKenna in order to attempt to prove her statement allegedly made prior to the trial that she “never saw Francis [the defendant] do anything to the child, and I was mostly with the child myself” was “harmless error.” 460 A.2d 1022-1025. The effect of these errors coalesced to deny improperly the defendant the opportunity to produce evidence that was, for all that the record shows, the only available evidence that casts doubt as to whether the defendant committed the acts causing the baby’s injuries. Because the opportunity to produce that evidence was denied, that issue was not generated. It is, consequently, illogical and unfair to say that the necessitous strategy of defense counsel in summation in doing the best he could with the resulting state of the record negated the obvious harm of the defendant’s erroneous deprivation of the opportunity to generate and to argue the issue of whether the defendant performed the acts injuring the baby.
Counsel was lawfully entitled to have two arrows in his quiver at argument. The fact that he missed the mark with the only arrow that he was permitted by the court does not provide, in my mind, any assurance that he would not have struck the mark if he had been permitted to loose the second shaft. I cannot bring myself to believe “it highly probable” that the exclusion of McKenna’s testimony “did not affect the judgment.” State v. True, 438 A.2d 460, 467 (Me.1981) (quoting R. Traynor, The Riddle of Harmless Error 35, 49-51 (1970)) (emphasis added).
I would vacate the judgment and remand this case for a new trial.