Maine’s highest court vacated a woman’s murder conviction Thursday.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court vacated Kailie Brackett’s murder conviction in a 42-page opinion. She had been found guilty of murder in December 2023 for the death of 43-year-old Kimberly Neputune on April 21, 2022.
Neputune was found inside her Thunder Road home in Pleasant Point. She had been stabbed and cut nearly 500 times on her legs, stomach, neck and head.
Sock-clad footprint testimony should not have been allowed as evidence and the error was magnified by the way it was characterized by the state during closing arguments, the supreme court justice’s opinion said.
The evidence, minus the footprint comparison, was “sufficient” to sustain Brackett’s conviction, the opinion said. The Maine Office of the Attorney General can retry Brackett but cannot use the footprint evidence.
Brackett’s case will be sent back to Washington County court.
The trial court was supposed to act as a gatekeeper to ensure the jury hears reliable and useful evidence, the opinion said.
Brackett’s attorney, Michelle King, argued Brackett was wrongfully convicted and the trial judge should not have allowed a forensic podiatrist to testify about sock-clad footprint evidence, calling it “junk science.”
“Justice was done in this case,” King told the Bangor Daily News on Thursday. “Brackett was wrongly convicted and is innocent. I hope the investigation will continue to find [Neputune’s] killer.”
The attorney general’s office refuted the assertions, saying the footprint analysis followed “accepted scientific principles.”
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The footprint issue stems from the state calling Dr. Michael Nirenberg, a podiatrist in Indiana, to testify. He said there was a “moderate level of support” that Brackett left the footprints at the scene of the murder. Nirenberg compared photographs of bloody footprints to sock-clad footprints of Brackett once she was in police custody.
Nirenberg’s analysis did not take the sock cloth and thickness into consideration and did not include Brackett’s weight at the time of the murder and when she had her foot print taken while in custody, which could cause variations in the footprint, King said.
The reliability of comparing “partial, bloody, sock-clad footprints found at a crime scene to sample sock-clad prints taken later of a foot clad in a different sock” is the main issue with the forensic podiatry, the opinion said.
“The current status of the field of forensic podiatry foot comparison is, at a minimum, debatable,” the opinion said.
Two of the three forensic organizations do not recognize forensic podiatry as relevant, the opinion said.
The way Nirenberg reached his conclusion does “not appear to be a methodology in the common understanding of the word within forensic science,” the opinion said.
The combination of the lack of reliability of Nirenberg’s testimony and the state mischaracterizing the evidence “cannot be disregarded,” the opinion said.
“Whatever could be gleaned from Nirenberg’s testimony, it is not that the sock-clad footprints definitively matched or were in fact Brackett’s,” the opinion said. “But the prosecutor stated that Brackett’s footprints ‘matched,’ and that ‘we know’ that the footprints at the scene were Brackett’s.”
King also argued that six pictures of Neptune’s body and stab wounds unfairly prejudiced the jury. The supreme court disagrees, the opinion said.
A trial against the second person charged Neputune’s death, Donnell Dana, 39, of Perry, ended in a mistrial when the jury failed to reach a verdict against him for murder. He reached a plea deal with prosecutors in January under which he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor hindering apprehension.
