Legal Maze! Maine Court’s Verdict Upholds Hunter’s Conviction, Was Mistrial Warranted?

AUGUSTA, Maine – Maine’s highest court confirmed a man’s conviction on Tuesday for illegally killing a second deer in 2019 and then claiming a mistrial based on evidence of boot tracks in the snow.

The Supreme Judicial Court upheld Richard Peters’ $1,500 fine and three-day jail sentence after a Penobscot County jury found him guilty of breaching several state statutes last year, including hunting a deer after killing one during the open season.

It was a more unusual case of hunting violations reaching the state’s highest court following a years-long investigation, trial, and appeal.

During the open deer shooting season in November 2019, a game warden visited Peters’ home after receiving a call from an Etna game registration station agent. According to the agent, Peters registered a doe he killed before returning two days later with a woman to register a buck she claimed to have killed.

However, the woman provided the same phone number as Peters, and the agent “became suspicious when Peters did all the talking concerning the buck,” as the high court noted in Tuesday’s decision. Several wardens visited Peters’ home and saw Peters and another man hanging a deer from the garage. According to Peters, the woman shot it with a.30-06 rifle when they were together in the property’s woods.

When the wardens asked for an explanation, Peters stated he “paunched” the deer by shooting it in the stomach, forcing him to follow it down and kill it with a neck shot. When one of the wardens pointed out that Peters confessed to shooting the deer and used the term “I” to identify who killed it, Peters became agitated and insisted he meant “we or them.”

The wardens investigated various boot tracks, drag marks, ATV tracks, blood, deer tracks, and a gut pile along a snowmobile trail on the property and discovered two bait sites — an apple pile and a foam fake tree stump containing bait, which was in front of a tree with “a blood splatter and what appeared to be a bullet strike,” the justices wrote.

Wardens executed a search warrant at Peters’ residence, seizing.30-06 and.300 caliber firearms, among other goods. Peters was accused of hunting a deer after killing one and unauthorized possession of wild animals, and a jury found him guilty on all counts in May 2023. Peters was acquitted of two further charges: exceeding the deer bag limit and illegal baiting.

Peters was sentenced in Penobscot County to the minimum mandatory penalties: three days in jail, a $1,000 fine for deer hunting, and a $500 fine for wild animal possession. Peters was allowed to serve his jail sentence under an alternative sentencing program.

However, Peters challenged the sentencing decision after moving for a mistrial, claiming that the court had blocked prosecutors from presenting evidence that would have required expert testimony or demonstrated that the size of boot tracks matched Peters’ rather than the woman’s foot size. Still, when questioned by a prosecutor, a warden stated that the woman had “relatively small feet.” The court reacted to Peters’ request by asking the jury to disregard inadmissible evidence references.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the lower court was correct in denying Peters’ mistrial application since it had already eliminated material requiring expert witness and given the jury the instruction Peters desired.

Among other matters, the Supreme Judicial Court agreed with Peters on a more technical claim. The trial court tried to have Peters spend his three-day jail sentence in Penobscot County, but the high court effectively said it should have followed through on its original plan to have him report to an Androscoggin County sheriff’s alternative sentencing program following his appeal.