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A judge has rejected a motion to dismiss a case against a Gouldsboro man accused of raping a woman 28 years ago.
The judge, Harold Stewart, in May threw out evidence that Maine State Police had obtained against Jason Follette. At the time, Stewart said the agency failed to properly obtain a search warrant before collecting DNA evidence from a large trash bin on a fishing pier owned by Follette. The trash bin was on private property and police had not been authorized by a judge to search it as part of their investigation, Stewart wrote.
But the judge has now ruled that the improperly obtained evidence does not warrant dismissal of the case. In a written decision on Follette’s motion, he noted that other evidence pointed to Follette as the primary suspect in the 1996 rape before police retrieved trash from the bin.
A Texas firm that specializes in forensic genetic testing had analyzed DNA evidence collected at the crime scene and already had identified Follette, 58, and his two brothers as possible suspects in the case, the judge said. Information about how the company linked the DNA evidence to the Follette family is not included in public court documents.
One brother was ruled out as a suspect after he voluntarily provided police with a DNA sample, Stewart wrote, and the other brother was not living in the area at the time the 1996 rape occurred in the town of Hancock. Jason Follette, on the other hand, had residential addresses in the nearby towns of Franklin and Sullivan in 1996.
This information remains admissible as evidence in the case against Follette, the judge said. Plus, following Stewart’s earlier ruling that threw out the trash bin evidence, Maine State Police used this information to successfully obtain a search warrant that authorized them to collect new DNA evidence from Follette.
Stewart also ruled in his Aug. 28 decision that the primary investigator in the case, Maine State Police Detective Dana Austin, did not make false statements in court documents or during prior hearings in the case, as Follette had alleged.
The charges against Follette stem from an investigation that dates to 1996, when two women in the town of Hancock separately contacted police 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.
Follette is next expected to appear in court in November for a dispositional conference on his case.
