PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The defendant accused of violating a federal hate crimes law when he and a nephew attacked two black men invoked the name of former Republican Gov. Paul LePage in a phone call in which he predicted he’d never be convicted in Maine, the nation’s whitest state.
Maurice Diggins, of Biddeford, said Maine people “want to keep the streets safe” and paraphrased LePage’s 2016 remarks about out-of-state drug traffickers “impregnating our women and selling our kids drugs.”
“He’s the racist, not me,” Diggins told his wife on a recording played for jurors Monday on the second day of his trial in federal court, the Bangor Daily News reported.
Diggins, who’s white, is being tried before an all-white jury in the first case in Maine to be under a 2009 federal hate crimes law.
Federal prosecutors are attempting to show Diggins was motivated by racial hatred when he and his nephew attacked two black men in Portland and Biddeford on the same night. Both of the victims suffered broken jaws that required surgery.
The recording was played Monday after Diggins’ wife was asked about her husband’s tattoos, including several Nazi symbols and a reference to a white power slogan.
“No 12 people are going to find me guilty,” Diggins said on the recording. ”Because we’re in Maine.”
U.S. District Judge Nancy Torreson allowed the recording to be played for jurors, ruling that it was “relevant and highly probative” to the defendant’s motives.
LePage made his remark about out-of-state drug dealers during a town hall meeting. He said out-of-state drug dealers with names like “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” commit crimes in Maine and “half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.”
LePage later called the remark “a slip of the tongue,” and said that he’d intended to say, “Maine women, not white women.”
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