A Troy woman has failed in her bid to be granted a new court trial, according to court documents.

Miranda G. Hopkins appealed her manslaughter conviction before members of the Maine Supreme Court, with arguments held June 12 and a decision reached July 17.

Attorneys for Hopkins argued that “the court erred in (1) denying her motion to suppress statements made to law enforcement officers during five different interviews and (2) giving the jury an allegedly confusing instruction on concurrent causation. Hopkins also challenges the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the jury’s conclusion, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Hopkins caused the death of her infant son” according to the Court’s finding.

“We affirm that judgment,” members of the Supreme Court, often called the Law Court, wrote in their finding.

The motion to suppress Hopkins’ interviews was made April 24, 2017, with her attorneys arguing that five separate interviews given to different law enforcement members were taken in violation of her Miranda rights and involuntary.

A Superior Court decision on the motion was made Oct. 17, when a written order granted part of the motion, while also denying part of the motion.

“The court made specific findings of fact as to each challenged interview,” according to the finding, which found that “the totality of the circumstances supports the conclusion that Hopkins’s statements to law enforcement officers during the five challenged interviews were voluntary.”

Supreme Court justices also wrote that they review jury instructions as a whole “for prejudicial error to ensure that they accurately and fairly informed the jury of the law and to determine the potential for juror misunderstanding as a result of the instructions.”

The finding states that when the trial judge received a note from the jury asking for “clarification on ‘causation’ the court responded by giving a clarifying instruction that used language similar to the language that Hopkins originally requested. The court did not err.”

Hopkins also argued that there was “not sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she ‘recklessly, or with criminal negligence, caused the death’ of her baby.”

In their finding, Supreme Court justices wrote that they find “the evidence was sufficient to support Hopkins’s conviction of manslaughter.”

Hopkins was convicted in Waldo County Superior Court as a result of the January 2017 death of her infant son, who had yet to reach two years old when he died.

The baby was found ‘’covered in bruises,” when Waldo County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the Troy home where Hopkins resided with the infant and her two older sons. Hopkins offered multiple versions of the night before she discovered the seven-week-old in bed beside her, cold and with visible bruising on his head. She reportedly admitted to drinking, taking Benadryl, and smoking marijuana the evening before discovering the infant in the early morning hours of January 12.

In an interview the day he died, Hopkins told a detective that she believed one of her older boys had been responsible. The older boys were aged six and eight at the time of the death.

A report from the medical examiner who autopsied the baby’s body found “abrasions and bruises all over the baby’s body; skull fractures on both sides of his head and on the back of his head, multiple rib fractures; upper right arm fractures; swelling and bleeding inside the scalp; retinal and optic nerve sheath hemorrhage; and bleeding into the cervical spinal cord.”

The affidavit notes that the medical examiner “opines that these injuries were indicative of ‘whiplash’ forces applied to the body and that the rib fractures were likely the result of a ‘squeezing of the chest’ type of blunt force.”

The baby’s cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma with craniocerebral injuries.

*An earlier version of this story misidentified the town Hopkins resided in as Rockport. 

Erica Thoms can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com