AROOSTOOK COUNTY, Maine — A woman serving prison time for leaving her newborn baby to die in a snowy gravel pit in Aroostook County nearly 40 years ago is appealing her sentence.
The baby's body was found in February of 1985 by a couple who lived near the gravel pit. In 2022, new testing of the baby's DNA led police to Lee Ann Daigle, who was living in Massachusetts. When confronted by officers, Daigle denied being the baby's mother, but last year she pleaded guilty to causing the child's death.
She was sentenced to six years in prison and three years of probation. During her sentencing, Daigle told the court she had regrets about what she had done and thought about it regularly, but the judge pointed out that she repeatedly told officers she was not the biological mother and therefore had either lied to them or to the court. He then gave her a chance to respond.
On Thursday during an appeals hearing, her lawyer argued that the judge put Daigle in an impossible position to defend her actions.
"It would seem that the court basically engaged in something that approached almost a cross-examination of her and basically said, 'You need to answer my questions, you need to figure this out or we're gonna go ahead,'" lawyer Neil Prendergast told the Maine Supreme Judicial Court justices. "Given the fact it had already been explained to her that she was looking at potentially a 20 year sentence she probably wasn't thinking as clearly as she should've been anyway."
A state prosecutor argued against that, saying Daigle put herself in that position, not the judge.
"Miss Daigle's statements created a dilemma of her own making," prosecutor Lara Nomani told the court. "Her statements to law enforcement took place over the course of several interviews, these were conversational interviews not confrontational ones. They were provided in discovery. They were summarized and outlined to the court at the Rule 11 proceeding which occurred many weeks before the sentencing."
The court will assess the two arguments before making a decision.