AUBURN — A decade after he was convicted of the murder of a Lewiston man, Michael McNaughton argued Wednesday for a new trial, citing roughly a dozen instances where he claimed his trial attorneys had made mistakes, which denied him his constitutional rights.

McNaughton, 36, handcuffed and in a jail suit, appeared in Androscoggin County Superior Court and sat in the same seat he occupied in 2014 when a jury convicted him of murder, hindering apprehension or prosecution and conspiracy to commit murder.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

The victim, 20-year-old Romeo Parent, also a Lewiston resident, was stabbed and strangled to death by McNaughton in 2013 in a remote area of Greene.

Parent’s body later was stripped of clothing, bound and dumped in a Monmouth stream.

The apparent motive for the killing was that Parent had implicated his friend, William True, 23, of Lewiston, in a burglary the two had committed less than a week before Parent’s slaying.

Parent was branded a “snitch” and the rumor circulated that “snitches need stitches,” according to trial testimony. Shortly after True was released from jail, Parent had been killed.

In 2017, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court rejected an appeal of McNaughton’s conviction.

He filed a petition for post-conviction review two years later, noting 11 instances where, he argued, his trial attorneys had failed to take appropriate action in his defense.

McNaughton claimed he had received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial.

On Wednesday, his two trial attorneys, Verne Paradie and Adam Sherman, took the witness stand and testified at an evidentiary hearing on McNaughton’s petition.

Among his claims, McNaughton wrote that his trial attorneys should have hired an expert to help prove through enhanced audio that he had exercised his Miranda rights during the early part of a taped interview with a police detective.

Paradie testified Wednesday that he believed he had, in fact, hired an audio expert to do just that.

Assistant Attorney General Leanne Robbin bolstered that argument by presenting an exhibit that showed an “authorization to expend funds for an audio enhancement specialist,” filed by the defense attorneys in that case.

McNaughton wrote in his petition that he had asked his trial attorney to block from being impaneled a prospective juror who was taking antipsychotic medication. His attorney failed to challenge selection of that juror, McNaughton wrote, “thus denying (him) a right to a fair and impartial jury of his choosing.”

Sherman testified Wednesday that the juror who had self-identified as having a borderline personality disorder had been, in fact, picked by defense counsel because there was a possibility her presence might disrupt proceedings enough to cause a mistrial.

“I thought, ‘What better way to get the jury talking to each other and arguing with each other,'” he said.

It had been a strategic decision to include her, he said.

McNaughton wrote in his petition that his attorney failed to enlist the aid of a “footwear/footprint” expert “to refute the state’s expert who testified at trial that a footprint outlined by investigating officers was not, in fact, a footprint.”

Robbins presented a Maine State Police Crime Laboratory report dated June 29, 2013, that included findings that the footprint impressions from the crime scene “were not of a quality that were suitable for comparison.”

In his petition, McNaughton wrote that his trial lawyer failed to have independently tested a human hair that was sent to the Maine Crime Lab found under the victim’s  fingernail, “which defendant asserts would result in exculpatory evidence on his behalf.”

Sherman said Wednesday that prosecutors hadn’t tested the hair for DNA because it lacked a root, which would have yielded the most reliable DNA result.

The lab could have sent the evidence to another lab to conduct a different DNA test on the hair, but Sherman said the best defense would be to point out the “deficiency in the state’s investigation,” questioning its integrity by noting the lack of follow through.

“A hair being under somebody’s fingernail could very well be a perpetrator. And they didn’t care who the perpetrator was if they didn’t send it out for testing,” Sherman said.

Moreover, the defense didn’t have the hair tested independently because of the possibility it might turn out to match McNaughton’s DNA, Sherman said.

In his petition, McNaughton raised other questions about his representation at trial, including the possibility of a police detective giving false testimony, prosecutors making “misleading and false” statements during closing arguments and the need for moving the trial to a different county due to pretrial publicity.

McNaughton had sought to remove the trial judge from reviewing his petition, but Justice MaryGay Kennedy said Wednesday that she would not recuse herself because that action is not “necessary nor warranted.”

Paradie said Wednesday that there was no physical evidence nor DNA presented at trial that was used to convict McNaughton.

“This case would have been a lot different had Mr. McNaughton not talked to police, which I still think was an unfair interrogation,” Paradie said.

It was, instead, McNaughton’s interview by police, coupled with the testimony of witnesses who said he had bragged about the killing, that had led to his conviction, Paradie said.

During Wednesday’s hearing, McNaughton and his attorney, Jeffrey Toothaker, took turns asking questions of witnesses.

Afterward, McNaughton began presenting closing arguments, but asked Kennedy for more time.

She gave him 10 days to prepare his closing arguments in writing.

Toothaker said he would retrieve McNaughton’s documents from him at Maine State Prison in Warren, where he is serving his sentence, and deliver them to the courthouse.

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