AUBURN – The 14 jurors assigned to the second manslaughter trial for Sarah Allen may have heard that eight months ago another jury could not decide whether to acquit or convict her.
They may have heard about the sole juror who stood firm to her belief that Allen didn’t shake her son to death, making a unanimous verdict impossible.
But none of that matters now.
On Tuesday, the first official day of Allen’s second trial, the attorneys for each side laid out the details of their cases as if they were doing it for the first time.
Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese painted Allen, now 31, as a frustrated mother who couldn’t handle her 22-month-old adopted son, Nathaniel, and eventually snapped.
Allen’s attorney, Verne Paradie, described his client as a grieving mother who was falsely labeled as a child abuser from the minute she arrived at the hospital on Feb. 14, 2003, with her unconscious son.
“Wipe the slate clean,” Paradie told the jurors in his opening statements, “and listen carefully to all of the evidence.”
The state’s case is expected to be nearly identical to the one it presented last June.
Its key witnesses are the doctors who treated Nathaniel and examined him before and after he died, including a radiologist, a neurologist, a child-abuse expert, a pediatric surgeon and a pathologist.
“They all agreed that Nathaniel received an inflicted head injury that was so severe that he had bleeding in his brain in two locations and bleeding in his eyes and neck,” Marchese said.
They also agreed, Marchese continued, that Allen’s story of the boy repeatedly falling on his head throughout the night could not explain the severity of his injuries.
At the last trial, Paradie left open the possibility that the falls could have caused the boy’s death.
This time, he focused his opening statement on the theory that the boy had an underlying brain disorder that could have been detected if doctors weren’t so quick to label him a victim of child abuse.
“Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault the doctors in this case,” Paradie said, “Child abuse is a serious issue. All I’m suggesting is that it’s not automatic that a child with these symptoms has been shaken.”
Nathaniel was Sarah and Jeremy Allen’s only son. The couple adopted him from Guatemala when he was 1 year old.
When Sarah Allen called 911 the night of Feb. 13, 2003, she was hysterically crying and barely able to talk as she told the dispatcher, “He’s not breathing. He’s not breathing. He fell very, very hard.”
Over the next several hours, Allen told emergency medical technicians, paramedics, the hospital staff and police officers that Nathaniel had fallen in the bathtub earlier in the night, then fell again after she brushed up against him in the bedroom.
The state claims Allen’s story about the nature and location of the falls changed throughout the night.
Paradie argued that Allen’s story stayed the same, and it was the medical professionals who mixed it up.
“It was like a game of telephone,” Paradie said.
Less than 24 hours after Allen called 911, a neurosurgeon at Maine Medical Center decided Nathaniel’s brain was so damaged that it wasn’t worth continuing surgery. The Allens agreed to take the boy off life support and to donate his organs.
Allen was eventually arrested and charged with manslaughter, a crime punishable by up to 40 years in prison.
Her husband, a Navy journalist stationed at the Naval Reserve Center in Brunswick, was out of town on Feb. 14. He has been convicted of assault for hitting the boy with a wooden spoon the previous day. Bruises on the boy’s thighs and buttocks were discovered while he was at the hospital.
Jeremy Allen faces up to five years in prison. He will be sentenced after his wife’s trial, which is expected to last three weeks.
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