Action Alert – Ongoing campaign to have Mary Kellett disbarred.
Kellett steps in it, big time
As I reported on recently, Mary Kellett, the Ellsworth, Maine prosecutor notorious for pursuing flimsy cases, always against men accused of sexual or domestic assaults, has put her foot in it again. Only this time it appears that her misstep has put her ankle deep in a bear trap.
A recap of the most recent case goes as follows. Keovilaisack Sayasane, 44, was charged with threatening to harm his wife with a hammer in their home. A problem for the prosecution in the case was that Sayasane’s wife was scheduled to testify for the defense. As the only eyewitness and alleged victim in the case it could have proven to be an insurmountable obstacle to a conviction.
But the wife had a change of heart about testifying when she was told by Mary Kellett that Sayasane had been convicted of killing his first wife some 25 years earlier. The Bangor Daily News reports that when the judge in the case, Justice Kevin Cuddy, learned of this, he ultimately declared a mistrial, which ended the current proceedings against Sayasane, but allows the prosecution to retry the case.
Sayasane, however, had not killed his first wife. He was convicted of manslaughter in the 1987 stabbing death of a man in Hampden, Maine.
Court transcripts reveal that both defense attorney Jeffry Toothaker and Mary Kellett informed the court that they were both given the erroneous information on Saysane’s conviction by Deputy Attorney General William Stokes, head of the Attorney General’s Office’s criminal division. But Stokes has a strikingly different story. Namely that it never happened.
This is Stoke’s version according to the Bangor Daily News:
“Stokes said he never provided any information to Kellett that indicated that the victim in the manslaughter case was Sayasane’s previous wife, or even that the victim was a woman. Stokes said he had no prior knowledge of the case before Kellett contacted him about it, and so had to go look up the information in case summaries that are kept on file at the Attorney General’s Office in Augusta.
The summary, Stokes said, indicates that the victim in the 1986 stabbing was a 21-year old man named Boudone Meuaneboutdy who was a friend of Sayasane’s. He said that is the information he forwarded to Kellett.
“Where the wife part came in, I have no knowledge,” Stokes said.
- Mary Kellett engaged in witness tampering by lying to the alleged victim in the case thus coercing her to withdraw exculpatory testimony.
- Mary Kellett further perpetrated a fraud on the court by misleading the judge to believe that she had been furnished information from the state AG’s office, when in fact she had been furnished no such information.
There may well be other violations that become apparent as this case is investigated further. But these two points of interest do serve as grounds for further complaints to the Overseers of the Bar in Maine, as well as to the office of Governor Paul LePage and the Office of the State Attorney General.
There is a pending bar complaint on Mary Kellett stemming from the Vladek Filler case that was filed by the National Coalition for Men. That complaint has been investigated and referred to the bar with the recommendation that sanctions against Kellett were warranted.
It was originally the position of AVfM that before a complaint was filed with the bar against Kellett for the Sayasane case that the Filler complaint would be allowed to come to conclusion. These recent revelations by the state AG of Maine are grounds to revise that decision.