Dechaine lawyers request look at DNA from seven other people

ROCKLAND – Lawyers for a Bowdoinham man serving a life sentence for the 1988 murder of a 12-year-old girl have asked a judge to grant them access to material in Maine’s DNA databank.

In a motion filed this week in Knox County Superior Court, lawyers for Dennis Dechaine say they believe seven people listed in the databank cannot yet be ruled out as having DNA that could match DNA found in material from the slain child’s fingernails.

The lawyers also seek all autopsy records from the state medical examiner’s office from July 8, 1986, through July 8, 1988.

The content of the motion suggests that some lawyers in the case suspect a biological sample from victim Sarah Cherry’s nails may have come from another cadaver examined by state doctors.

Dechaine is serving a life sentence at Maine State Prison in Warren.

He was convicted of the July 1988 murder in Bowdoin after police discovered his truck near where Cherry’s body was found mutilated and sexually assaulted. Receipts bearing his name were found in the driveway of the home where Cherry had been baby-sitting. The girl was bound with rope, pieces of which police say came from Dechaine’s truck.

Dechaine maintains his innocence. He is seeking a new trial based on some DNA test results the state announced earlier this year.

Defense team member Steven Peterson of Rockport said Thursday that this week’s motions were intended to ensure “both sides have all of the same information.”

The motions indicate that the state intends to argue “that male DNA taken from blood scrapings from underneath the fingernails of the victim in this matter are explainable by the failure of the medical examiner’s office to follow basic sanitation and hygiene measures in the use of autopsy implements,” Waterville attorney Michaela Murphy said in her motion.

The defense is seeking the autopsy reports to “see if the bodies autopsied were male or female, if fingernail clippers would have been used in any of the autopsies, and any other information which might establish if, in fact, cross-contamination could have occurred as the state is arguing,” Murphy wrote.

Murphy could not be reached Thursday.

According to one motion, the state has provided the defense with summaries of interviews with medical examiners Drs. Ronald Roy and Henry Ryan “in which it is suggested that the medical doctors who performed autopsies for the state of Maine did not regularly wash their implements after using them on cadavers.”

On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Bill Stokes declined comment, noting the case is in litigation. Stokes said he was unaware of the recent motions.

Earlier this year, state DNA testing determined the specimens from Cherry came from a male, but not Dechaine. Independent testing conducted a decade ago at a private laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., showed the DNA was not Dechaine’s, but the testing did not determine gender.

The state’s report on the DNA test results announced in July remain sealed to the public.

The defense states in the motions it is willing to limit disclosure of the materials.

No hearing date had been scheduled on this week’s motions.