Re: “Greg Kesich: It is time for Dechaine’s champions to lay case to rest” (July 22):
According to Portland Press Herald editorial page editor Greg Kesich, retired Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent Jim Moore “uses the medical examiner’s testimony to make his own time-of-death calculation, which he says clears (Dennis) Dechaine because (murder victim Sarah) Cherry would have still been alive when he was taken into custody.”
In fact, if one does the math, Deputy Chief State Medical Examiner Ronald Roy’s initial testimony, based on standard forensic science, also placed Sarah’s death after Dechaine’s whereabouts were known.
More recently, renowned forensic pathologists Drs. Cyril Wecht and Walter Hofman, having studied the time-of-death evidence, concluded that Dennis Dechaine could not have killed Sarah Cherry.
Although the post-conviction DNA statute calls for the consideration of “all the evidence in the case, old and new,” the trial judge and the law court have chosen not to allow a jury to consider the affidavits of Drs. Wecht and Hofman, nor contemporaneous notes by detectives that undermine their testimony that Dechaine confessed.
Greg Kesich wants Trial and Error to disappear; we will happily comply when Dennis Dechaine is given a retrial in which a jury hears all of the evidence!
William Bunting
Whitefield
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