An Ellsworth man was sentenced Thursday to serve three years in prison for exchanging gunfire with local police in his apartment building.
Jeffrey S. Paine, 69, did not intend to shoot at Ellsworth police when they went to arrest him at his apartment in December 2023, Judge Terence Harrigan ruled last week. But his conduct was reckless, said Harrigan, who presided over Paine’s bench trial in June.
Harrigan said Thursday during Paine’s sentencing that he hoped to hear remorse from Paine over the sequence of events that led to the incident. But in a 10-minute statement, Paine instead said he was acting within his rights when police knocked on his door and that police did not have a right to force their way into his apartment.
“They had an arrest warrant,” the judge interjected, shaking his head after Paine said police did not have a warrant to enter his apartment and take him into custody.
The warrant was from an earlier incident in September of that year in which Paine was charged with failure to stop for police, after he refused to cooperate with an officer who pulled him over for not having his truck registered.
The judge said that whatever Paine’s beliefs may be about what is lawful, he was reckless in his conduct when, three months later, police knocked on his door to arrest him on the warrant. Instead of complying with the officers’ orders to drop the gun he was holding when he answered the door, Paine tried to shut the door on police, which prompted them to forcefully shove the door open out of fear that a hostage situation or shootout might ensue, the judge said.
The force of the door striking Paine caused him to unintentionally fire his gun, and police responded by shooting through the wall next to the door, wounding Paine in the arm, Harrigan said. It might not have amounted to attempted murder, the judge determined, but it was reckless conduct with a firearm.
Paine, who during his statement said it was police who broke the law and not him, could have genuinely expressed remorse for putting at risk the officers’ lives, and potentially those of other residents in the building, the judge said.
“But you didn’t. You doubled down,” Harrigan said.
The judge did not impose any probation for Paine to serve upon his release, saying that Paine was not a good candidate for probation. But he noted that Paine, as a convicted felon, would never be allowed to possess a firearm again.
On the conviction for failure to stop for an officer, Harrigan imposed a $350 fine but no jail time.
Both Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger, who prosecuted the case, and Will Ashe, Paine’s defense attorney, declined to comment after the sentencing.
The incident garnered attention not just for the danger it posed to others, but for what happened in the hours after it occurred.
The shooting resulted months later in Glenn Moshier, who at the time held positions both as Ellsworth’s city manager and police chief, being fired from both jobs. Moshier was placed on leave as police chief days after the shooting and, following an investigation, was determined to likely have been intoxicated when he found out about the shooting and reported back to work that same night.
