Details of Maine assault allowed

TRENTON, N.J. – Prosecutors can present details, including bite-mark evidence, from a 1995 attack on a Maine state trooper in the retrial of a man charged with murdering and raping a New Jersey woman in 1994, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

New Jersey’s highest court, however, barred prosecutors from using an FBI database of violent crimes in an effort to show similarities between the sex crimes.

Both women were bitten on the chin and left breast. The link led to the arrest of Steven Fortin, a Woodbridge man who had moved to Newport, Maine.

Fortin had been convicted in 2000 and sentenced to death in the killing of 25-year-old Melissa Padilla, a mother of four from Woodbridge. But the state Supreme Court overturned the verdicts in 2004, finding that the trial judge failed to follow its instructions regarding testimony from an expert witness for the prosecution.

Fortin, now 42, remains in custody at New Jersey State Prison. He was returned to New Jersey after pleading guilty to the sex assault on the trooper in Maine, where he was sentenced to a 20-year prison term.

Five justices endorsed the ruling to allow the linking evidence. A sixth, Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto, agreed with much of the decision, but disagreed with its provision that prosecutors must provide the defense with a database of cases that support expert testimony.

Rivera-Soto contended that since experts are already required to offer opinions that are “firmly tethered either to the facts in evidence or to data outside the record,” there is no need to further burden them.

The court also addressed the FBI database, known as ViCAP, for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. The majority determined that since the prosecution experts did not rely on ViCAP to form their opinions, it “should not be admissible to bolster those opinions.”