To the Editor:
The state’s case against Dennis Dechaine boils down to the fact that items, accessible to anyone, were removed from Dechaine’s truck, and to the desperately held hope at the attorney general’s office that Dechaine is guilty. Wishes, however strongly held, are not evidence.
Now that facts previously concealed by the state have been exposed, the evidence of Dechaine’s innocence far outweighs the theories suggesting his guilt.
During the trial prosecutors succeeded in blocking DNA testing and also the admission of all psychological findings; obscured the time of death; and put detectives on the stand whose damning testimony, we now know, was contradicted by their original notes.
Officials, taking ethical shortcuts to achieve what they believed to be a justifiable end, likely put an innocent man in prison for life, while allowing a psychopathic killer to go free.
These actions suggest that winning the game had taken precedence over arriving at the truth, as did the state’s incineration of potential DNA evidence after Dechaine filed an appeal. The attorney general could end suspicions that her office remains more concerned with saving face than in seeking justice by dropping its current opposition to a retrial, in which, at long last, a jury would hear all of the evidence.
William Bunting, Whitefield
