PORTLAND – The Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday affirmed for the second time this year the conviction of an Orono man who contended his mother’s statements to police before he murdered her should not have been admissible at trial.

In March, the justices unanimously rejected Mark John Barnes’ appeal of his conviction the previous year in Penobscot County Superior Court. On Tuesday, the court rejected his request for reconsideration.

Barnes, 34, contended that his mother’s statement to police after an earlier assault should not have been presented at trial.

He said doing so was a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to confront his accuser in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

In a March 8 decision, the nation’s high court overturned a 24-year-old precedent under which the statement of a witness who was not available for cross-examination could be used at trial if the judge found it to be reliable. The basis for the decision was the Sixth Amendment’s “confrontation clause,” which gives a criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

The state supreme court in Tuesday’s ruling agreed with prosecutors in the Maine Attorney General’s Office that the mother’s statement after she drove herself to a police station in 1998 did not represent testimony to which her son was entitled to cross-examination.

Police officers were obligated to find out what happened when a tearful Barbara Barnes arrived at the police station and it was not a structured interview based on known criminal activities, the court said.

“Considering all of these facts in their context, we conclude that interaction between Barnes’ mother and the officer was not structured police interrogation triggering the cross-examination requirement of the Confrontation Clause as determined by” the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Leigh Saufley wrote.

Efforts Tuesday to reach Barnes’ court-appointed attorney, Jeffrey Silverstein of Bangor, were unsuccessful.

Barnes is serving a 65-year sentence for killing Barbara Barnes, 59, four days before Christmas in 1999. Her body was found in her Orono apartment after she was beaten, strangled, stabbed and suffocated.

Barbara Barnes, a longtime waitress at Pat’s Pizza, repeatedly told police, family and friends that her son had mental health problems and needed treatment. He consistently refused to undergo a psychiatric examination, even after he was charged with his mother’s murder.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.