Background
In the early morning hours of May 12, 2021, Jacob Miller — now known as Jaydè Miller — attacked her roommate and brief sexual partner in their Portland, Maine apartment after becoming angry about vitamin bottles left on the floor. According to the victim’s accounts, Miller strangled her to unconsciousness four separate times over the course of the assault, also slamming her head into the floor, biting her, and preventing her from escaping or calling for help. The victim ultimately escaped by deploying pepper spray and fleeing to a parking lot, where neighbors called 9-1-1. She was transported to a hospital with injuries including an anoxic brain injury, traumatic brain injury, petechial hemorrhages, and bite marks on both arms.
The State initially charged Miller with five crimes, including attempted murder. Following a March 2023 settlement conference, Miller agreed to plead guilty to domestic violence aggravated assault (Class B) under 17-A M.R.S. § 208-D(1)(D), with all other charges dismissed and sentencing to be contested. At the combined plea and sentencing hearing in January 2025, Miller admitted only to the victim’s initial account of a single strangulation incident, while the State pressed for findings consistent with the victim’s later, more detailed statements describing four separate strangulations. The State also submitted an expert medical report from a doctor who had reviewed the victim’s records and opined on her injuries and their mechanisms.
The trial court sentenced Miller to seven years in prison, with all but four years suspended, and three years of probation. In determining the eight-year basic sentence at step one of Maine’s three-step sentencing framework, the court relied on the victim’s fuller account — presented at sentencing in person — and on the State’s expert medical report, neither of which were subject to cross-examination. Miller appealed, arguing the court violated her federal due process rights by relying on unsworn, untested statements and an uncross-examined expert report.
The Court’s Holding
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court unanimously affirmed the judgment. Writing for the panel, Justice Douglas held that sentencing courts have wide discretion to consider information not subject to the evidentiary rules governing trial, constrained only by the due process requirement that such information be factually reliable and relevant. Because Miller failed to object to either the victim’s statements or the expert report at sentencing — declining even to request cross-examination, seek a continuance, or offer a competing version of events — the court reviewed only for obvious error and found none.
On the victim’s unsworn statements, the court found no due process violation because Miller had been expressly warned before entering her plea that the sentencing court retained authority to make its own factual findings and might credit the State’s fuller version of events. Having chosen not to contest the victim’s account at sentencing, Miller forfeited any procedural protection she might otherwise have sought, and the court was warranted in treating the uncontested statements as reliable. On the expert report, the court found it independently supported by the breadth of sources the doctor reviewed — including emergency-responder reports, medical records, body-camera footage, 9-1-1 calls, and photographs of the victim’s injuries — and further corroborated by the victim’s own live statements at sentencing.
The court also declined to address Miller’s cursory Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause argument for inadequate briefing, but noted in passing that the weight of federal authority holds the Confrontation Clause does not restrict a court’s consideration of hearsay at sentencing, even after Crawford v. Washington.
Key Takeaways
- Maine sentencing courts may rely on hearsay — including unsworn victim impact statements and unsworn expert reports — so long as the information is factually reliable and relevant; there is no per se requirement of cross-examination.
- A defendant who fails to object, request cross-examination, seek a continuance, or present a competing version of events at sentencing waives those procedural protections and will be held to an obvious-error standard on appeal.
- A sentencing court’s explicit pre-plea warning that it may independently find facts and credit the State’s version of events undercuts any subsequent due process challenge to that very exercise of fact-finding.
- An expert who did not personally treat the victim may still provide reliable sentencing evidence if his report is grounded in medical records, investigative files, witness interviews, and other corroborating materials.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces Maine’s well-settled rule that the Sixth Amendment trial rights — including the right to confront witnesses — do not carry over wholesale into sentencing proceedings. Defense counsel must affirmatively invoke procedural protections at sentencing (requesting cross-examination, challenging report authors, presenting counter-evidence) or risk waiving them entirely. The decision also signals that a defendant’s strategic choice to limit her admissions at a Rule 11 proceeding does not bind the sentencing court, which retains independent fact-finding authority over the full range of reliable information before it.
For practitioners, the case illustrates the high stakes of sentencing strategy in contested-facts cases: remaining silent to “not spend the Court’s time” can translate directly into an eight-year basic sentence rather than one anchored to a narrower version of the offense. The opinion also adds to the body of authority, growing across federal circuits and now explicitly noted by the Maine SJC, that Crawford‘s confrontation right does not extend to the sentencing phase.