Paul Pollard testifies

Court transcripts

The next witness was Paul Pollard. Shuman escorted him into the courtroom. He walked him down the aisle and patted him on the back as he sent him on his way to the witness stand. There was nothing attractive about this man. His hair was mousy brown and he was short and fat. He was wearing a beige colored suit and tie. I assumed he was told to dress to impress the jury, but to me he looked like a fat little butterball.      Pollard was asked to raise his right hand, gave his name and swear to tell the truth.  Pollard testified that he, and his brother, Lionel Cormier, and Percy Sargent and his brother, Richard Sargent, had planned and carried out a November 26, 1980 (more than five-years previous) armed robbery on Charles Dolan, a drug dealer they assumed had money and drugs at his home. He said his role was to drive the get-away car.      He said when Cormier and the Sargent brothers left the car they took a rifle. He got $3,000 for driving the get-away car. The spring of 1981 (one month after they killed Mike) he, Cormier and Robert Smith robbed Dolan again. He again drove the get-away car and this time got $10,000.      Almy asked, “Did there come a time, several years, later when you advised somebody about your involvement in these two incidents?”      “Mr. Shuman had come to the college to ask me some questions about a fire I’d been in, and we talked about that, and then he—then I told him about these incidents of robberies simply because it is something that’s been inside me for a long time, and I just—just had to get it out and get it over with.      He said he had no idea what was going to happen to him when he made those statements. But after he made the statements, he was told he would not be prosecuted for these particular crimes. Defense Attorney Billings began his cross-examination of Pollard bringing up the two armed robberies he had committed. “For your involvement in these two crimes where force and weapons were used to extract property from another person, what’s going to happen to you?”      “For my part here in this courtroom, I am putting myself in danger by testifying against these people.”    Toward the end of his cross-examination he asked Pollard “Aren’t you, in fact, a suspect in Micheal Cochran’s death?”      “I don’t believe so.”      Almy quickly objected and told the Judge that Billings’ line of questioning was argumentative. A bench conference was held. Billings wanted to question Pollard at length about Mike’s murder for the purpose of showing that the government witness was not credible, but Judge Beaulieu ruled that the questioning would impeach the witness and go beyond the scope of legal limitations. He gave Billings until the next day to review his arguments in support of that line of questioning.       Shuman was there to grab Pollard and rush him out of the courtroom.      The next morning,  the Bangor Daily News reported the armed robbery trial. It said,  "J. Hilary Billings, a Bangor attorney representing, Sargent, attempted to elicit testimony from Pollard which would indicate that the 26-year-old Readfield man had made a deal with the prosecutors in exchange for not being charged in the, Feb. 18, 1981, murder of Micheal Cochran.      "Pollard admitted that he ran from a burning Dedham camp the night Cochran died inside the structure."

Return