Supreme court vacates Brackett's conviction in murder of Neptune

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court has voided the conviction of Kailie Brackett for murdering Kimberly Neptune of Sipayik in April 2022. Brackett had been sentenced to 55 years in prison following a three-day jury trial in Machias in December 2023. The state can now retry Brackett for the murder, but footprint comparison testimony must be excluded. As of February 10, the attorney general's office had no comment on whether it would retry the case.

In its February 5 decision, the law court ruled that the trial court erred in admitting testimony regarding the identity of a partial, sock-clad footprint at the scene, with the error "magnified by the state's characterization of that testimony in its closing and rebuttal argument." The court's decision, though, also states, "Setting aside the footprint comparison evidence, the evidence at trial, while not overwhelming, was sufficient to sustain Brackett's conviction."

That evidence included testimony that Brackett was overheard saying that Neptune had stolen money and was going to pay for it; Brackett's withdrawal of just over $700 from Neptune's bank accounts; surveillance video that could be seen as showing suspicious conduct on Brackett's part; and bloody handprints on the wall in Neptune's apartment where she was killed indicating that someone had reached where Brackett knew that Neptune usually kept her pills.

During the trial, the state presented 21 witnesses, including relatives and neighbors of Neptune, local and state law enforcement officers, a forensic chemist and a forensic DNA analyst, along with a podiatrist, Dr. Michael Nirenberg.

In the appeal of the conviction, Brackett's attorney, Michelle King, asserted that the evidence was not sufficient to convict her; that the trial court should have excluded Nirenberg's testimony; and that the prosecutor's argument constituted an error. King argued that Nirenberg's testimony was unreliable, is not generally accepted within the scientific community and the studies he relied on in forming his opinion were not based on facts. In her appeal, King maintained that Nirenberg's opinion that there was "a moderate level of evidence" to support that Brackett made a sock-clad, crime-scene footprint used as evidence during the trial was not sufficient in establishing the facts of the case. During the trial, another forensic scientist, Alicia McCarthy, had stated that Nirenberg's conclusion was not reliable.

In its decision, the supreme court found that the admission of Nirenberg's testimony "without a proper foundation or articulation of an opinion useful to the jury, coupled with the prosecutor's characterization of Nirenberg's testimony as establishing that the partial footprint was in fact that of Brackett, requires a new trial."

The court pointed out that the state had to show, in presenting expert testimony, that the science is reliable, that the expert is qualified and that the testimony will be helpful to the jury. Noting that forensic podiatry foot comparison may not be a recognized field of science, the justices stated that the issue "is the reliability of the comparison of 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." The decision states, "Even if the general field of forensic podiatry footprint comparison could be deemed sufficiently reliable, the approach applied by Nirenberg was not the methodology adopted within the field after 2012, few modern studies focus on sock-clad comparison, and Nirenberg's approach in choosing what he compared and the results he deemed relevant were not based on any replicable standard."

The opinion also states, "Whatever could be gleaned from Nirenberg's testimony, it is not that the sock‑clad footprints definitively matched or were in fact Brackett's. But the prosecutor stated that Brackett's footprints 'matched' and that 'we know' that the footprints at the scene were Brackett's."