State v. Cray

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STATE OF MAINE v. AMANDA CRAY Defendant

No. CR-2022-010

Superior Court of Maine, Kennebec

December 9, 2022

KENNEBEC, ORDER ON DEFENDANT'S MOTION FOR DISCOVERY SANCTIONS

Deborah P. Cashman Justice

This matter came before the court on December 1, 2022, for hearing on defendant's motion for discovery sanctions. Defendant was present and represented by Attorney Scott Hess, Esq. The State was represented by Assistant District Attorney Tyler LeClair, Esq. Defendant seeks discovery sanctions for the State's failure to preserve and/or produce a video of the interaction with Defendant in the booking room following her arrest for OUI.

In this testimonial hearing, the court heard from the Augusta Police Department court officer and evidence technician, Christopher Hutchings as well as the City of Augusta IT employee, Corey Beaulieu. After the evidence closed the court took the matter under advisement. Having now considered the evidence and the oral arguments of counsel at hearing, the court makes the following findings of fact and conclusions of law:

The Augusta Police Department's video recording system is part of a larger data collection system which services the entire city. Videos created at the Augusta PD, are maintained, and stored, on a large server which also contains video data from other city entities such as the school department and public works. This system is maintained by the City of Augusta IT Department at City Center, and the server is hundreds of terabits in size. Stored videos are preserved on the server until the memory is full; which is typically after 30 days on the server. As storage reaches capacity, the system is set to automatically purge data according to the date created, from the oldest recordings to the newest. This process happens automatically and only those IT employees with administrative credentials can access these controls. No one at the Augusta Police Department has such credentials.

In early October 2021, some secondary software stopped working. Rather than overwriting the storage with newer data, this software failure caused the overwriting function to stop whereupon new videos could not be written. On Friday October 1, 2021, the server displayed an alert, at approximately 5:18 pm, after the close of business. This alert stated that the server was at or nearing capacity. Rather than allowing the system to write to the hard drive, from this point on, no additional recordings were created or retained as the system was at capacity.

On October 2, 2021, Defendant, Amanda Cray, was arrested on suspicion of OUI. She was taken to the Augusta Police Department where she was administered a breathalyzer test in the department's "intoxilyzer room." This room is equipped with a video...