PORTLAND — Maine’s highest court turned down an appeal by Charles Reed Black, who had asked judges to overturn his conviction of attempted murder and multiple counts of assault, after he was accused of pushing his wife off Maiden’s Cliff in April 2011.

In the appeal, Black had argued that the case against him heard during his five-day July 2014 trial in Knox County Superior Court lacked sufficient evidence to support his conviction, and that the court erred by declining to change location of that trial given the amount and type of publicity.

In September 2014, Knox County Judge Joyce Wheeler sentenced Charles Reed Black to 25 years in prison, with all but 10 years suspended. She also placed him on probation for six years. He is currently in the Maine State Prison in Warren.

The six judges sitting on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court panel upheld the jury’s conviction of attempted murder and five counts of aggravated assault. Read the entire decision here.

The  April 7, 2011 incident drew mountain rescue teams and Camden and Lincolnville firefighters to the steep slope of Megunticook Mountain, off of which Lisa Black Zahn had tumbled over boulders, and had eventually crawled to the side of Route 52, which runs below the mountain alongside Megunticook Lake.

A motorist stopped to help her, and then the search was on for Charles Black, who also was injured in his descent of the same rubble-filled cliff. Both were transported to area hospitals.

The Maine Supreme Court documents said that the couple married in 2004.

“In 2010, Zahn inherited a substantial sum of money and, in February of 2011, she discovered that Black had been having an affair with his high school girlfriend,” according to the court filing. “Although Black and Zahn had decided to try to salvage their marriage, their relationship remained tense and uncertain.

“On April 7, 2011, at Black’s suggestion, he and Zahn hiked Mount Megunticook in Camden. They picnicked on Maiden Cliff, a steep peak roughly 700 feet high. When Zahn turned her head away from Black, Black hit her three times on the back of her head with a large rock he had found at the scene.

“He then dragged her to the edge of the cliff and pushed her over the side. Zahn fell about 10 feet down onto a small ledge. She then dropped another 35 feet down a steep ravine while attempting to get away from Black, who was coming after her.

“Soon after, Zahn saw Black tumbling down the mountain, ‘like a pinball almost,’ hitting trees and rocks as he fell.”

Following his indictment, Black, in March 2012, asked for a change of court venue, citing overwhelming and prejudicial publicity. He argued that selecting an impartial jury would be futile and attached 12 news articles to his request.

“Over two years later, on July 14, 2014, the court (Wheeler, J.) began the process of selecting a jury in the Knox County Superior Court,” the judges wrote in their Jan. 14, 2016 decision. “On that day, the court conducted individual voir dire of each of the potential jurors, who indicated that he or she had seen media coverage of the case, asked each the details of what the juror had heard and if the juror could be fair and impartial in the case, and excused those few jurors who stated that they could not be fair and impartial based on that coverage.

“After the State and Black exercised their peremptory challenges, 12 jurors and three alternates were impaneled as the jury. Of those, seven had seen no media coverage of the case and eight had seen some coverage but stated that they could be fair and impartial and base a verdict only on the evidence presented at the trial.”

At that point, Black did not request a change of venue.

After reviewing the 12 news articles that Black submitted to the court in 2012 as evidence of the publicity, the Maine Supreme Court concluded that they were not prejudicial.

“Eleven of the 12 articles Black produced focused on his and Zahn’s rescues, the police investigation, his arrest, his bail conditions, the indictment, and the trial schedule,” the judges wrote in their decision. “One additional article discussed Black’s possible motives. None of the articles posited that Black was guilty and the articles contained summaries of both Black’s and Zahn’s statements to police.”

The judges wrote: “There was no basis for the court to find, absent an inability to draw a fair jury, that Black could not receive a fair trial in that venue.”

They also concluded that the evidence produced was sufficient to support his conviction.

“Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the State, we conclude that there was sufficient evidence on which a jury rationally could find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Black committed each element of each of the crimes of which he was convicted,” they wrote. “Zahn’s testimony alone satisfied each of the elements of proof.... Her version of events was corroborated by the injuries she suffered, and by the evidence that her blood was found on the rocks at the top of the cliff and on Black’s clothing and shoes. In addition, her testimony that Black hit her with a rock before pushing her off the cliff was consistent with the statements she had made to multiple witnesses at various times, including the strangers who stopped to help her, the paramedics who treated her at the scene, the fire chief who responded to the scene, and two treating physicians. That Black himself was also seriously injured in the incident, whether Black stood to gain Zahn’s inheritance if she died, and the existence of other contradictory evidence are of no moment because the weight and credibility of the evidence was for the jury’s determination.”

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