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Maine Courts allow false evidence and Holocaust analogy to convict Vladek Filler

July 23, 2012
By

UPDATE:

Now The Ellsworth American has exposed Mary Kellett as well!

In addition, both local newspapers have even come out and published “Ligia Filler’s” name which has always been suppressed because she is considered a victim which is absurd by any measure of common sense.

Also, the Bangor Daily News has doubled the size of it’s initial article (expanded version below) and published few details of the Bar Complaint and the case.

Per DA Carletta Bassano’s demand Filler to be held at undisclosed jail during Kellett’s August 30-31 disciplinary hearing.

By Bill Trotter, BDN Staff
Posted July 23, 2012, at 12:45 p.m.
Last modified July 23, 2012, at 5:24 p.m.

ELLSWORTH, Maine — The Maine Board of Overseers of the Bar, which governs the professional conduct of licensed attorneys in the state, has decided to pursue a prosecutorial misconduct complaint against Assistant Hancock County District Attorney Mary Kellett.

The complaint stems from Kellett’s conduct in prosecuting former Gouldsboro resident Vladek Filler on charges that he had raped his wife. Filler, who now lives in Lawrenceville, Ga., originally was tried three years ago on charges of assault and gross sexual assault in connection with events that allegedly took place at the Fillers’ home off Route 186 in December 2005 and April 2007.

After two trials and two state supreme court appeals, Filler ended up being acquitted of all rape charges but was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to serve 21 days in jail.

In an 18-page disciplinary petition filed with the Board of Overseers’ grievance commission, Kellett is accused of violating nine rules of the Maine Bar with statements she made during her closing arguments at Filler’s first trial, in January 2009, and by withholding evidence and interfering with subpoenas issued by Filler’s defense attorney for that trial. Filler’s second trial was prosecuted by First District Attorney Paul Cavanaugh, who is not accused of any misconduct in the case.

The board’s disciplinary petition against Kellett was prompted by a grievance complaint filed by Filler with the board in December 2010. Kellett’s disciplinary hearing, which is open to the public, is scheduled to be held next month, Aug. 30 and 31, at the Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor.

Filler’s most recent appeal was argued before the Law Court last month. On July 3, the court affirmed Filler’s May 2011 conviction for misdemeanor assault.

Kellett was out of the office on vacation on Monday and was unavailable for comment, according to staff at the Hancock County district attorney’s office. Attempts Monday to contact Carletta Bassano, district attorney for Hancock County, were unsuccessful.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Lupton, who is representing Kellett in the matter, declined to comment Monday about the pending complaint.

J. Scott Davis, bar counsel for the board of overseers, also declined to comment on Monday, saying that the board’s policy is not to comment on pending complaints against attorneys beyond what is printed in disciplinary petitions.

Filler has contended since he was first accused of rape that his marriage was deteriorating and that his wife, from whom he is now divorced, had fabricated the allegations in order to win custody of their two sons. After his first trial, Filler was granted custody of their sons, who are 15 and 6 years old, in the couple’s subsequent divorce. The boys live with their father in suburban Atlanta.

During Filler’s first trial, Justice Kevin Cuddy did not allow Daniel Pileggi, Filler’s attorney at the time, to question Filler’s wife about her efforts to gain custody of her children. The judge decided to prohibit such testimony after Kellett argued that doing so would create a “confusion of the issues” before the jury, because the trial was about the criminal assault charges rather than the custody dispute.

Cuddy did allow Pileggi to say that the marriage was deteriorating and to suggest that a child custody dispute was likely after Filler’s wife reported the alleged assault to police.

But Kellett herself alluded to a child custody dispute in her closing arguments. According to the board’s disciplinary petition, Kellett suggested to the jury that there was no evidence that a child custody dispute existed when in fact there was — it just had not been introduced at trial.

“The suggestion that Ligia Filler has made all this up just for the purpose of getting ahead in the child custody, where is the evidence of that?” Kellett told the jury, according to the disciplinary petition.

After the trial, Pileggi filed an appeal for a new trial, which Cuddy subsequently granted. In September 2010, the Law Court upheld Cuddy’s decision and allowed Filler’s case to be retried. Evidence of the child custody dispute should have been allowed in the trial, the Law Court indicated, and Kellett’s comment in her closing arguments about the lack of such evidence “amplified” the prejudice to Filler that resulted from the exclusion of the child custody testimony.

In the board’s disciplinary petition, Bar Counsel Davis wrote that Kellet’s comments “were intentional and improper attempts to persuade the jury that the reason no evidence of a custody dispute had been presented was because none actually existed.”

The petition said Kellett’s comments violated bar rules because “she in fact knew that there was significant evidence of the custody dispute, and also knew that the only reason that actual evidence of the custody dispute had not been presented to and considered by the jury was because she had successfully moved to have it excluded by the trial court.”

Kellett made references to other supposed “facts” during her closing arguments, even though they not been introduced as evidence during testimony, which also violated bar rules, according to the petition. She also said, the petition indicates, that there was no evidence that indicated that a sexual assault had not taken place, which suggested that Filler had a “duty and burden” to present such evidence.

“Filler clearly had no such burden, and ADA Kellett certainly knew that fact under basic constitutional law and case law,” Davis wrote in the document.

Aside from comments Kellett made during her closing arguments at Filler’s first trial, Kellett also is accused of violating bar rules before and during Filler’s first trial by withholding discovery materials from Pileggi and by interfering with a subpoena issued by the defense attorney.

According to the disciplinary petition, Pileggi repeatedly requested documents and other investigative material from Kellett such as police audiotape, videotape, photographs, transcripts and reports germane to Filler’s case. Kellett is accused of not responding to some of Pileggi’s requests, of providing limited material or information in response to others and of advising a police officer not to comply with a subpoena from Pileggi — despite a June 3, 2008 court ruling that ordered Kellett to hand over the requested materials to the defense attorney.

In some cases, Kellett told Pileggi to obtain the materials he sought directly from police agencies that generated them, according to the petition. In one case, Filler and Pileggi did not receive requested documentation from police until “several months” after Filler’s first trial had ended, the document indicates.

That material, related to an assault complaint filed by Filler against an Ellsworth man in the week after the sexual assault supposedly had occurred, eventually was provided to Filler directly by the Ellsworth Police Department, and not by Kellett, according to the petition.

Follow BDN reporter Bill Trotter on Twitter at @billtrotter.

 

 

Vladek Filler

Vladek Filler

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5 Responses to Maine Courts allow false evidence and Holocaust analogy to convict Vladek Filler

  1. Anonymous in CALI on October 23, 2012 at 4:54 PM

    I am trying not to make a predetermination just based on looks, just on a mountain of history. This is just something to think about and it goes to the mindset of these women. From the looks of it, and the short hairstyles of Mary Kellet and the DA, Carletta Bassano (a Janet Reno look-a-like) may suggest that these two women are very,,,,, very,,,,, very,,,,, close??? How many times have we seen the ultra-ultra-ultra feministic viewpoint, one that is so strong, that it transcends into the whole arua of the individual. Hey, gang members dress a certain way, “look a certain way” and act a certain way. The bottom line; if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck; maybe,,,,, just maybe, it is a duck. Therefore, if it is a duck, then it acts, thinks, and reacts in a very predicable (based on science) manner. Maybe this explains the lunacy surrounding this criminal corruption. Just think about it!

  2. Dean Tong on July 25, 2012 at 2:08 PM

    Mr. Filler called me about his case several months ago. I told him I had previous professional experience with the Maine criminal justice system relative to alleged child sexual abuse and it wasn’t good. I told him about the necessity to engage experts in a case like his and that if he couldn’t afford to do so, that the court would have to consider ordering the state to pay for the same. I was never retained in the case and was never privy to the discovery in the case.

    Dean Tong, MSc.

  3. Fred Sottile on July 24, 2012 at 7:23 AM

    This abuse of “judicial instructions” to these juries has to be exposed. Juries tend to want to please the judge. This star-struck collusion with judicial power is a pandemic problem. Good people, once they are included at the court’s table of power, become “court drunk,” and forsake their own minds. I don’t know why this happens, but it does.
    People MUST learn to be better jurors.
    Both the court and the lawyers do not want an educated jury.
    Jury tampering starts with jury selection.

  4. Ray on July 24, 2012 at 3:16 AM

    “Witch-Hunting Males” at Youtube, http://tinyurl.com/65dpzwu shows the corrupt, gender-feminized evil, that exists in America’s legal systems today. Some people in the MRM, and others, have wrongly commented that “Witch-Hunting Males” is too harsh, too indiscrete, but the treatment of innocent men by the corrupt legal system proves it isn’t. If anything, it’s too mild and understated.

    Besides, unlike America’s gender feminized, evil, legal system, “Witch-Hunting Males” is telling the truth.

  5. Artur Oborski on July 24, 2012 at 2:41 AM

    These people defy description… none that I can describe here, without being polemic…

    This makes us all very angry, (to put it mildly), that they think they can get away with this nefarious behaviour… with impunity…

    UNBELIEVABLE!!!

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