State’s highest court upholds Auburn man’s attempted murder conviction

PORTLAND — The state’s highest court on Thursday upheld the convictions of an Auburn man found guilty at trial of attempting to kill his girlfriend with a gun.

Germaine Page Androscoggin County Jail

But the Maine Supreme Judicial Court threw out the sentences on two of the misdemeanor convictions of Germaine Page, 44, of Auburn.

Androscoggin County Superior Court Justice Harold Stewart II sentenced Page to one year in prison each for domestic violence assault and domestic violence terrorizing. Each of those crimes is punishable by up to 364 days in jail.

A court clerk said those convictions are expected to be scheduled for resentencing once Page’s file is sent back to the trial court in Auburn.

Page had been seeking a new trial after a jury in August 2022 found him guilty of attempted murder domestic violence reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon and domestic violence criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon, all felonies.

The jury also convicted Page of the two misdemeanors in which the sentences were remanded back to the trial court for resentencing. And Page was found guilty of a third misdemeanor, discharging a firearm near a dwelling.

Justice Stewart sentenced Page to 23 years behind bars, but suspended all of that time except for 13 years on the conviction of attempted murder. He was ordered to be on probation for six years after his release. All of the sentences on the other lesser convictions were to be served at the same time as the attempted murder sentence.

Page’s attorney, James Howaniec, appealed Page’s convictions, first to the trial judge, then to the state’s highest court, which also serves as the state’s court of appeals.

Howaniec appeared before that court in May when he argued that the trial judge should only have allowed the defense to present at trial exculpatory evidence given to the defense later than it should have been.

Howaniec argued that the trial judge should not have allowed all the late evidence, including evidence that might be beneficial to prosecutors, to be presented at trial.

The high court agreed that evidence was shared by prosecutors with the defense after the deadline set by the court.

Because of that untimely discovery, Justice Stewart had issued a sanction against prosecutors that generally prohibited them from using evidence that it had given to the defense late, but Stewart had allowed prosecutors to use any evidence that directly rebutted Page’s evidence or that directly related to, further explained, or completed any of the late-provided evidence that Page introduced at trial.

Page had told the trial court judge that he didn’t want to delay his trial with a continuance and wanted a speedy trial, as he was constitutionally guaranteed.

“The trial court’s discovery sanction struck a fundamentally fair balance between the parties’ competing interests and … it did not abuse its discretion by crafting a sanction that limited the state’s introduction of evidence contained in the late discovery while also preventing Page from presenting a completely sanitized defense,” Associate Justice Rick Lawrence wrote for the high court.

Howaniec had also appealed Page’s conviction by arguing there was an appearance of racial inequity in the jury pools made available for jury selection in trials in Androscoggin County Superior Court in Auburn.

He had argued the racial makeup of the residents called for jury duty did not constitute a fair cross-section of the community, which has experienced an influx of Somali immigrants over the past decade. Yet, he said, the lack of racial diversity in the jury pools remains largely the same as it did 10 years ago.

In the high court’s opinion, Lawrence noted that Justice Stewart had reasoned that, “although it was attempting to collect race, ethnicity, and gender data from prospective jurors through a preliminary questionnaire, Page’s failure to make appropriate motions before jury selection or objections during that process resulted in the court not being alerted of the need to compile data on the original composition of the jury.”

For that reason, that demographic information wasn’t available at Page’s hearing for a new trial.

“Because the court could not compare the jury venire’s original composition to data on the racial makeup of Androscoggin County, it could not even begin to address the applicable standard, the absolute disparity test — the analysis used to assess whether the racial makeup of the jury venire passed constitutional muster,” Lawrence wrote.