Sharon Carrillo prepares to leave Waldo County Superior Court in Belfast on Tuesday after a hearing on whether the state could use records obtained from a school she attended. She is charged with murder in the death of her 10-year-old daughter.
BELFAST — A judge on Tuesday ordered attorneys for the state to turn over records they obtained by controversial means from a New York school Sharon Carrillo attended and a Walmart where she worked.
Carrillo and her husband, Julio, are accused of killing of Sharon Carrillo’s daughter Marissa Kennedy, 10, who was found dead in the couple’s Stockton Springs home in February, allegedly as the result of beatings that occurred over many months. The couple each face a charge of depraved indifference murder.
Superior Court Justice Robert Murray on Tuesday granted a motion by Sharon Carrillo’s attorneys to block the records, but delayed responding to a separate motion to have the state attorneys who obtained them disqualified from the case for misconduct.
The dispute arose from a pair of subpoenas sent by the state to Maplebrook School, a private boarding school for people with intellectual disabilities in Amenia, New York, that Carrillo attended, and to the Walmart Supercenter in Newburgh, New York, where Carrillo may have worked.
The subpoena prompted the school to hand over confidential records, including a psychological evaluation.
Laura Shaw, an attorney for Sharon Carrillo, said the state had no authority to subpoena records from an out-of-state institution, which would have required the additional step of filing a motion with the court to request the records.
Additionally, she said, the subpoenas referred to an April 6 hearing, a court date that both sides on Tuesday confirmed had never existed. Shaw argued that the date was included to force the recipients, who were unlikely to be able to travel to Maine for a court hearing, to mail their records.
“It was basically making up a court date to get the school to send over the records,” she said.
Shaw said the Maine Attorney General’s Office should have known better and the number of errors suggested an attempt to trick the recipients into complying.
“The fact that there are so many of them leads to the conclusion that this was done in a careless and fraudulent manner to obtain our client’s records,” she said.
Assistant Attorney General Leane Zainea acknowledged the state misstepped, but she said the errors were procedural. If the state had been trying to do something underhanded, she said, it wouldn’t have notified Carrillo’s attorneys of the subpoenas.
Zainea said the state had not planned to use the records unless the argument of the defense centered on Carillo’s mental state or cognitive ability at the time of her daughter’s death. Based on previous statements by Carrillo’s co-counsel, Christopher McLean, about Carrillo’s IQ and a neural psychological evaluation, Zainea said, “it appears to the state that this is where this case is headed.”
Upon orders from Murray, Zainea turned over a pair of envelopes she said contained copies of all mail and email sent by Maplebrook School CEO Donna Konkolics. She said the state did not receive any records from Walmart because it rescinded its subpoena after two days.
Murray ordered the state’s attorneys to turn over originals of any paper documents obtained through the two subpoenas by the close of business Thursday, “gather and delete or destroy” copies, and provide the names of anyone in state government or law enforcement who had reviewed them.
In a separate motion, Shaw asked the court to disqualify Zainea and fellow Assistant Attorney General Don Macomber. However, Murray did not rule on the motion and said he would ask the defense about it again after the disputed records were collected and sealed.
Asked after the hearing if the defense, based on the testimony Tuesday, planned to pursue the disqualification motion, Shaw said, “Yes, definitely.”
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