SKOWHEGAN — The attorney for a former Nokomis High School music teacher convicted earlier this month on felony domestic violence charges has filed a motion for a new trial based on evidence from the victim’s former husband, which the lawyer said has been received since the trial ended.
In his motion, filed last week in Somerset County Unified Criminal Court, attorney Leonard Sharon alleges that Andrew Maderios was set up by the victim just as her former husband was, and that evidence from the ex-husband supports Maderios’ defense. Maderios was convicted Sept. 4 on two counts of aggravated assault and two counts of domestic violence assault,
Sharon said those facts are cause for a new trial.
A letter to the presiding judge from Steve LaMarre, the victim’s former husband, states that the victim in the Maderios trial sent him threatening text messages once it was learned he might be called to testify in Maderios’ defense. LaMarre alleges that the woman, who the Morning Sentinel is not naming because she is a victim of domestic violence, had been physically violent with him in the past and injured herself “in an effort to set him up.”
Maderios, 29, of Pittsfield, testified in his own defense during his trial that the same thing had happened to him, that he was set up by the victim as a way to ruin him. He was convicted of strangling the victim during beatings she recorded on her cellphone in January and March 2014.
District Attorney Maeghan Maloney said Monday that the evidence is not new, which is one of the criteria for a new trial.
“The state does not agree that the evidence is new, as similar claims were made before the trial that the court did not find credible or relevant,” Maloney said Monday.
“The defense continues to want to blame the victim for the serious assaults Mr. Maderios committed. The jury found Mr. Maderios guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of two aggravated assaults and two domestic violence assaults.”
The 12-person jury deliberated for about two hours and 20 minutes before it came back with the verdicts on Maderios, who was charged with beating, kicking and strangling his girlfriend from December 2013 to July 2014.
The victim documented those attacks at the Pittsfield home the couple shared with audio recordings and still photographs, all on her iPhone, which became key evidence in the five-day trial.
Sharon told the jury on the second day of the trial that Maderios’ former girlfriend had planned since January 2014 to falsely accuse him of domestic abuse. He told the jury that, much as a drug addict would fake an injury to get narcotics, Maderios’ former girlfriend faked the charges against him to “make a good plan” to ruin his life and his career.
Sharon’s motion is not an appeal of the guilty verdict. It is a call for a new trial based on all the necessary criteria, he said, including the fact that all of the new information from the former husband has been discovered since the trial. LaMarre’s letter to Justice Robert Mullen is dated Sept. 10 — six days after the trial ended.
Sharon said outside the courtroom after the verdicts in September that there were issues raised before Mullen in open court the week before the trial started that pointed to similar previous behavior by the victim.
“The general motive was to take this guy down,” he said in Skowhegan on Sept. 4. Testimony about the victim’s alleged previous behavior was not allowed at Maderios’ trial because it would have called for “a trial within a trial” with each side having to defend or deny her earlier activity, Sharon said. The trial, he said, only concerned the indictments against him.
In the motion for a new trial, Sharon states that his office received an unsolicited phone call from LaMarre asking if he could send a letter he had written to Sharon to Mullen, who presided over the Maderios trial in Superior Court. In the letter, LaMarre admits that although he was interviewed several times by Sharon’s team, he withheld information regarding his former wife — the victim in the Maderios trial.
He wrote, “When the alleged victim was informed of me potentially being someone the defense would subpoena, she immediately started sending me threats through text to control my input.
“It actually was effective as I did not share all I could with the defense team and maintained an attitude towards the case that the best course of action was to not get involved.”
In his motion, Sharon said that LaMarre has since come forward with the information that his former wife had been physically violent with him in the past and that, as in the Maderios defense, the woman had been the aggressor. He said that the woman made it clear to previous partners that “Today is the day of the victim” and proved that by beating LaMarre and when he called the police, “she injured herself to set him up as the abuser and her as the victim.”
LaMarre wrote that he was afraid of his wife at the time and “never trusted our system” to support a man in a domestic dispute. He said the woman had bloodied his face with several blows from a VCR tape, and when he called police, she slammed her own head against a wall several times “to simulate abuse from me.”
Sharon said he has screen shots from the woman’s cellphone to LaMarre documenting the threatening exchange.
The two counts of aggravated assault Maderios was found guilty of carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison on each count. The domestic violence assault convictions carry a sentence of one year in prison on each count.
Maderios’ sentencing as well as the motion for the new trial are set for 8:30 a.m. Monday in Somerset County Superior Court in Skowhegan.
Doug Harlow — 612-2367
Twitter:@Doug_Harlow
Send questions/comments to the editors.
