The Maine Supreme Judicial Court will hear the appeal of a Monticello man convicted and sentenced to serve 55 years in prison in 2025 for the murder of his live-in girlfriend Kimberly Hardy.
Jayme Schnackenberg, 42, claims a number of errors were made by the court during his trial and alleges his due process rights were violated, according to his appeal documents filed with Maine’s highest court.
Last January, a jury of nine men and three women found Schnackenberg guilty of murder in the 2023 shooting death of Hardy — a decision they reached following a five-day trial in Aroostook County Superior Court in Houlton.
During the first day of the trial, the state told the jurors that Schnackenberg murdered his girlfriend of six years by shooting her twice in the head and that he thought he could get away with it because he had hidden her body in a remote, wooded area off the Harvey Siding Road where she would not be found.
Jurors deliberated for less than an hour before handing down the verdict. Schnackenberg was sentenced in March.
In his appeal, Schnackenberg made several claims, including that the exclusion of Hardy’s toxicology report by the trial court was in error and was an abuse of the trial court’s discretion, according to appeal documents filed with the court.
He also contended that the legal instructions provided to the jury failed to provide a clear and adequate explanation of the state’s burden in disproving a self-defense claim, and that photographic evidence of Hardy’s skull was “gruesome” and only served to inflame prejudice in the minds of the jury.
He also alleged that the court failed to correctly weigh the mitigating and aggravating factors, and that his maximum sentence was excessive.
In response to his appeal, the prosecutors said that in the early morning hours of June 16, 2023, Schnackenberg shot Hardy, his girlfriend of six years, twice in the head as she tried to leave their home on 9 School St. in Monticello.
“He attempted to clean the home of the blood, packaged Kim’s lifeless body in layers of tarp and garbage bags secured by duct tape and straps, and then disposed of her body off a logging road in a remote section of the Irving forest land,” Assistant Attorney General Leanne Robbin said in her appeal response.
Regarding the graphic photo, the prosecution said the images were necessary to illustrate the testimony of the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner and the forensic anthropologist.
“Schnackenberg argues that ‘a photograph is worth a thousand words.’ We agree. But that does not make these photographs unduly prejudicial,” Robbin said in the court documents. “Rather it indicates the power of a photograph to facilitate a layperson’s understanding of expert testimony.”
During last year’s trial, jurors heard Maine State Police interviews with Schnackenberg and saw evidence collected at the scene, including multiple blood samples matching Hardy’s DNA and a fragment of skull that fell from a mop at Schnackenberg’s Monticello home.
The trial included statements from evidence analysts, surveillance footage of Schnackenberg’s movements in the days following Hardy’s death and testimony from friends and acquaintances, including two brothers who said Schnackenberg told them he shot Hardy in the head twice.
When Schnackenberg took the stand in his own defense, he detailed drug use, violence and a deteriorating relationship with Hardy, and said he initially lied to police before sharing his self-defense story in court.
Schnackenberg’s attorneys said he killed Hardy, but it was in self-defense. Assistant Attorney General Kate Bozeman said during the trial that the self-defense argument did not add up.
During sentencing, Justice Stephen Nelson said that the basic sentence was 45 years but a number of aggravating factors upped that time.
“Mr. Schnackenberg has just ice water running through his veins,” Nelson said at the time. “The sinister will that is required to package and bind Miss Hardy’s lifeless body was substantial … Her body was found in a ghastly condition so carefully prepared by Mr. Schnackenberg.”
Supreme judicial court justices will hear Schnackenberg’s appeal at 1:30 p.m. Thursday. The hearing will be live streamed.
