Background
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services petitioned for child protection in April 2023 as to five children of Jennifer B., citing unsafe living conditions and chronic school truancy. A preliminary protection order placed the children in the Department’s care in June 2023. The District Court held a termination hearing across three days in July, September, and November 2024.
At trial, the Department presented evidence of four positive drug screens from 2024. Three of them — from January, June, and July — were introduced through the testimony of the program director of New Season, an addiction treatment center where the mother was a client. That director had minimal direct contact with the mother and relied on entries in her case file compiled by third parties; the underlying test documentation was never produced to defense counsel or offered as an exhibit. The fourth screen, from August 2024, was properly admitted through a forensic toxicologist who testified from personal and professional knowledge.
The mother objected at trial to the June and July screen testimony as inadmissible hearsay. The court declined to strike it, stating that additional information would be forthcoming — but none ever was. The District Court found parental unfitness by clear and convincing evidence, explicitly citing all four positive screens, and terminated the mother’s parental rights in a judgment entered December 6, 2024. The mother timely appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court held that the testimony about the January, June, and July drug screens was inadmissible hearsay under Maine Rules of Evidence 801 and 802. Because the program director was recounting statements recorded in the mother’s case file by third parties — and those statements were offered for the truth of the matter asserted — no adequate foundation existed for their admission. The court found that admission of the June and July screens (to which the mother had objected) was an abuse of discretion, and that the January screen was likewise admitted in error, though the court declined to resolve whether that admission alone rose to obvious error.
The court further held that the error was not harmless. The District Court’s unfitness finding leaned heavily on all four positive screens, characterizing them collectively as proof of ongoing substance use and rejecting the mother’s false-positive explanations. Because it was unclear whether the trial court would have reached the same conclusion based solely on the properly admitted January and August screens — particularly given other mitigating evidence in the record — the appellate court could not say with high probability that the erroneous admission did not affect the outcome.
The court also noted, without resolving, concerns about the best-interests analysis: the judgment did not appear to adequately address evidence that the children wished to be reunited with their mother and that she maintained custody of at least one other child. The court vacated the termination judgment and remanded for further proceedings.
Key Takeaways
- Drug-screen results introduced solely through a treatment program director’s reference to third-party case-file entries — without the underlying documentation, chain-of-custody information, or personal knowledge of the testing process — constitute inadmissible hearsay and lack the foundation required for admission.
- A trial court’s promise to require supplemental foundational evidence does not cure a hearsay objection if that evidence is never actually produced; the court cannot simply defer ruling and then rely on the unauthenticated testimony.
- Where a termination judgment expressly and repeatedly relies on erroneously admitted evidence, the error is not harmless unless the record makes clear the court would have reached the same result on the properly admitted evidence alone.
- In a best-interests analysis under 22 M.R.S. § 4055, a court must make specific factual findings addressing the statutory factors — including children’s expressed wishes to reunite with a parent — even if those wishes are not ultimately controlling.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces strict evidentiary gatekeeping in parental-rights termination proceedings, where the stakes — permanent severance of the parent-child relationship — are among the highest in civil law. Attorneys representing state agencies must ensure that drug-screen results are introduced through witnesses with direct, personal knowledge of the testing process, or through properly authenticated business records, not merely through program administrators recounting what appears in a client file.
For practitioners representing parents, the case illustrates the importance of timely hearsay objections and of pressing the court to act on those objections before the evidence becomes embedded in the factual record. It also signals that Maine’s high court will scrutinize best-interests analyses that omit meaningful engagement with children’s own stated preferences and with a parent’s demonstrated capacity to care for other children in the home.