Supreme Court of Maine Finds Statement Made 20 Minutes After Aggravated Domestic Assault Qualified as an Excited Utterance

Similar to its federal counterpart, Maine Rule of Evidence 803(2) provides an exception to the rule against hearsay for "[a] statement relating to a startling event or condition, made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement that it caused."

So, would a statement by a victim of aggravated domestic assault made about twenty minutes after the assault qualify as an "excited utterance" under this rule? That was the question addressed by the Supreme Court of Maine in its recent opinion in State v. Sheppard, 2024 WL 5250190 (Me. 2024).

In Sheppard, 

On June 3, 2020, Officer Spencer Simoneau of the Lewiston Police Department was on routine patrol. At about 6:00 a.m. he saw the victim walking near the corner of Bartlett Street and Walnut Street “appear[ing] to be distressed.” Simoneau saw that the victim looked like she had been crying and that “something was wrong with her face.” When he stopped and went to talk to her, the first thing she said to him was that “her boyfriend, Ramel Sheppard, had beat her up.” Simoneau was then able to see that the victim's face was swollen; she was bleeding; and she had tears coming out of her eyes, one of which was “crooked” and not tracking equally.

After Sheppard was convicted, he appealed, claiming that the victim's statement was inadmissible as an excited utterance because 20 minutes had passed before she made it. The Supreme Court of Maine disagreed, concluding that

Here, the victim made her spontaneous statement, which directly concerned a very serious event that by its nature was both startling and stressful, about twenty minutes after it occurred. At that time her physical and emotional condition were such that the officer felt compelled to stop and investigate even though the victim was simply walking along a public street. She had no time to reflect on or fabricate the statement because it was made to a police officer whom she did not summon, and did not know was coming, within ten seconds of his appearance. 

Contrary to Sheppard's chief contention, the twenty-minute interval between the assault and the victim's statement is not, given the other factors found by the court, dispositive of whether she had an opportunity to fabricate the statement. As Sheppard concedes, in Curtis we affirmed the trial court's finding that a statement made “within 20 minutes” following an assault qualified as an excited utterance....

On this record, we have no difficulty in concluding that the trial court did not clearly err in finding that the victim remained under the stress of excitement caused by Sheppard's assault when she made the statement to Simoneau identifying Sheppard as her attacker, and thus did not abuse its discretion in admitting the statement as an excited utterance.

-CM