By Christopher Williams,Staff Writer
Victim was 81-year-old Lewiston man

AUBURN – Maine’s highest court on Tuesday upheld the convictions of two Lewiston men who drove over an 81-year-old man with his car and killed him.

David Lakin and Shaun Tuttle were sent to prison last year after an Androscoggin County Superior Court jury found them guilty of kidnapping and murder.

In their appeals, the two men claimed they should have stood trial separately. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Tuesday in favor of the lower court’s decision, saying it was “unpersuaded” by the two men’s arguments. Lakin was sentenced to 52 years. Tuttle, who reported James McManus’ death to police, got 47 years.

The high court’s decision recounted the events of March 9, 2004.

After a night of drinking at a Lewiston bar, Lakin and Tuttle went to McManus’ Blake Street apartment. They woke him, demanded his car keys and wrapped a belt around his neck. They led him outside to his car then drove him to a secluded spot on a dirt road in Turner. There, he was strangled with a rope and laid in the road. McManus was run over by his own car. It crushed his skull.

After their indictments, prosecutors filed a notice to join the two cases for a single trial because they involved the same acts and witnesses.

Through their lawyers, both men claimed their statements to police would prejudice a jury if they were tried together.

In January 2005, the lower court allowed the state three possible ways to go to trial:

• try the two men together before a single jury and not allow their statements to police;

• try the two men together before two separate juries and exclude the statements of each defendant from that jury; or

• hold two completely separate trials.

Prosecutors agreed not to include either of the men’s statements to police and tried them together before a single jury.

At the trial, each of the men accused the other of killing McManus.

Because their respective defenses were at odds and would prejudice the jury against each other, their lawyers said the two men should have been allowed separate trials.

They argued each other’s defendant took on the role of “second prosecutor” in the case.

The state’s high court wrote that have a case with conflicting defenses doesn’t require separate trials for cases that have factually similar circumstances.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that “mutually antagonistic defenses are not prejudicial,” the state’s high court wrote.

The lower court judge instructed the jury to consider each defendant’s case separately during its deliberations and to conclude guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.