The Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday heard the appeal of convicted murderer Anthony Pratt Jr., who fatally shot a woman in the neck in Portland and left her body in the back of her SUV in a motel parking lot.
Pratt, 22, who was a drug dealer from Far Rockaway, New York, is arguing that the judge at his trial last year should not have allowed jurors to listen to a recording of a police interview in New York during which the lead detective investigating the murder of 29-year-old Margarita Fisenko Scott repeatedly called Pratt a liar.
But as Pratt’s attorney, Jamesa Drake, made that argument, justices reframed the debate as one about the public’s perception of police credibility.
“Our primary argument was that that tape was inadmissable” because it could have prejudiced the jury, Drake said.
In the recording, Portland police Detective Richard Vogel repeatedly tells Pratt to stop lying about his nicknames and tells him to be honest about his role in Scott’s death.
Drake argued that if Vogel had been testifying from the witness stand, he would not have been allowed to call Pratt a liar under court rules of evidence. She said that the trial judge’s instruction that jurors should not take Vogel’s questions as fact wasn’t enough to allow the recording to be admitted as evidence.
But as Drake made that argument, Chief Justice Leigh Saufley asked her whether jurors are savvy enough to understand how police questioning of criminal defendants works.
“In this day and age of trial in the media, all kinds of fictional representation, aren’t jurors already fairly conversant with the fact that detectives are going to challenge and run at these people who are being interviewed? Do you think jurors are actually persuaded by the information in the questions by these detectives?” Saufley asked.
“Absolutely,” Drake said. “There is no question that police officers today are given high regard in our society.”
“Au contraire,” Justice Ellen Gorman interjected.
“We are living in a post-Ferguson world. Is it your position that jurors are giving law enforcement a pass at trial?” Saufley asked.
“Not a pass, but I don’t think Ferguson has brought out a sort of national consensus that police officers are the enemy, are not helpful. I think there are a small segment of the community … in this country that have a troubled history with policing. I do not know whether any of the jurors in this case are members of that type of community,” Drake said.
In Ferguson, Missouri, the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer on August 9, 2014, sparked a nationwide debate about the relationship between police and African Americans and the use of deadly force.
Assistant Attorney General Donald Macomber, who argued that the court should reject Drake’s arguments, told the justices that the state Supreme Judicial Court had previously ruled in a case with a very similar circumstance that recordings can be admitted with instructions to the jury from the trial judge.
“This is a very simple case,” Macomber said. “Whatever the detective says, it is not for the truth, it is to give context for the answers that the defendant is giving.”
Pratt was convicted of shooting Scott on Nov. 11, 2012, in the living room of an apartment at 266 West Concord St., where Pratt was living with a couple he knew from New York City. Police say Pratt killed Scott while the couple were out at nightclubs between 1 and 3 a.m., cleaned up the blood and disposed of Scott’s body before they got home. He was sentenced last year to serve 42 years in prison.
Scott’s husband, Cary Scott, testified at trial that he didn’t know his wife was dead until he discovered her body more than two months later in the back of a Chevrolet Trailblazer in the parking lot of Motel 6 on Riverside Street in Portland.
Police tied Pratt to the murder in part by a piece of chewed gum with his DNA that was used to plug a bullet hole in the wall of the West Concord Street apartment and by fact that Pratt was seen assaulting Scott earlier in the day before her death.
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