Judge tosses trash-bin DNA evidence in decades-old Maine rape case

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A judge has thrown out the evidence in a 28-year-old rape case against Jason Follette of Gouldsboro, saying police did not have the right to seize and search his trash without a warrant two years ago.

In 2022, shortly before charging Follette, state police collected DNA evidence that implicated him in two sex crimes that dated back to 1996, after searching through trash bags that his wife had thrown into a large metal trash bin.

But Justice Harold Stewart on Friday ruled that police did not have the right to seize the trash without a warrant, and that the DNA evidence collected from it can’t be used by prosecutors.

With the evidence barred, Follette — whom one prosecutor has described in court as a suspected serial rapist — is seeking to have the case dismissed.

Don Brown, Follette’s defense attorney, did not respond Monday to messages seeking comment about Stewart’s ruling.

Robert Granger, district attorney for Hancock County, declined to comment Monday.

The ruling could upend a criminal case that has been nearly 30 years in the making, since two women in the town of Hancock separately contacted police in 1996 to report the suspected sex crimes. Even though a suspect was not identified until much later, charges were filed in court in 2002 based simply on a genetic profile from DNA samples that police recovered from the crime scenes.

In one case, a woman who lived on Route 1 in Hancock reported in August 1996 that she had been raped in her home by a man wearing a disguise. Two months later, another woman reported that someone had gone into her car, which had been parked across the road from the other woman’s home, and ejaculated onto the steering wheel.

Both samples matched each other, police have said.

Maine State Police have not said how they came to believe Follette, now 57, might be a suspect, but two years ago they decided they wanted to get a sample of his DNA to see if he was a match, according to court documents.

In October 2022, without seeking a search warrant, police seized a trash bag that they had seen Follette’s wife throw into a large metal trash bin on a fishing wharf in the local village of Prospect Harbor. They found used cotton swabs in the trash bag and, after testing them, determined the DNA on the swabs matched the samples collected at the crime scenes in 1996.

Police, who initially had hoped to search through trash bags that Follette placed in front of his house by the side of Pond Road, later said that they did not need a warrant because he had “abandoned” the property in a place that was readily accessible to the public.

But Brown challenged the seizure of the trash bag without a warrant, arguing that Follette owned the wharf and had leased the trash bin from a waste management company. There were “private” signs posted on a building which, along with nearby fishing gear owned by Follette, showed that he had an expectation of privacy to the wharf and its contents — a key provision in whether or not police should have obtained a warrant.

Justice Stewart agreed with Brown, saying that police would have been equally prohibited from removing a trash bag from Follette’s house or his yard without a warrant.

If the circumstances of the trash bag disposal had been different — if it had been placed on a public sidewalk, for example — Follette could not reasonably expect the same level of privacy, and a search warrant might not have been necessary, the judge wrote.

“Although there was an intention shown to eventually throw the trash away, while in the dumpster at the wharf the trash was still protected with the expectation of privacy,” Stewart said.