In January in San Diego Superior Court, Judge Dwayne Moring ruled there was enough probable-cause evidence to order that Larry Millete stand trial for murder in connection with the disappearances of his wife, Maya Millete.
Maya, the mother of three young children, was last seen entering the couple's Chula Vista home on Jan. 7, 2021.
NBC 7 Investigates spoke with attorneys, legal experts and even retired judges about the 10-day hearing, which many saw as unusually long. Several had plenty to say about what happened in court, critiquing a large number of sustained objections to questions launched by defense attorney Bonita Martinez.
What was unknown until now was what happened during sidebars attended by Moring, Martinez and Deputy District Attorney Christy Bowles, who is prosecuting the case.
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The Maya Millete Case: This is an entry in NBC 7's live blog coverage of the Larry Millete Hearing. To read other entries, CLICK HERE
In court, sidebars are granted by a judge to allow conversations to take place outside of the hearing of the jury, and those discussions can include testimony or evidence that the jury isn't supposed to consider in future deliberations. Sometimes those conversations are completely off the record. Other times, a court reporter will be included and transcribe everything that's said.
The Larry Millete preliminary hearing didn't feature a jury at all, so these sidebars were largely being held in order to conduct conversations away from the ears of members of the public who attended the hearing, including witnesses who had yet to testify. That was also the case with the court-approved livestream of the proceedings. Now that the hearing concluded, NBC 7 Investigates was able to obtain the court-reporter transcripts of several of those sidebars.
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Blood Evidence
One such sidebar occurred during the first hour of the second day of hearing. David Garber, a forensic specialist with the Chula Vista Police Department, was on the witness stand at the time. During previous testimony, it was revealed that blood evidence was collected from the Milletes' master bathroom. Moring called a sidebar with attorneys to discuss the evidence. From her line of questioning, it seemed that Martinez wanted to hear about the analysis of that evidence.
"I didn't want to do this as a speaking objection; however, there was a blood collection in the bathroom," Bowles said. "The blood was tested. It is not May Millete's blood. There is no blood evidence that I am presenting as part of my preliminary hearing evidence. So my position is that this is just sort of a discovery expedition on the part of defense, and that is why it is beyond the scope.… This person is just a collector and documenter of the evidence and has been asked about blood in the bathroom.”
The judge argued that it was somewhat fair for Martinez to ask questions about the blood evidence because Bowles brought it up but said Garber would not be the person to ask, so he sustained the objection. The prosecution said she intended to address it further with a future witness, a Chula Vista Police Department detective.
Maya's Affair
Later that day, another sidebar was held to spar over testimony about Maya’s affair with a subordinate coworker. At that point in the proceedings, it was not established that the affair had taken place; later testimony, however, revealed that was the case.
Days later, the prosecution questioned a witness who presented evidence that it did happen, but prior testimony from Maya’s family and friends didn’t reveal if they confirmed it. Leading up to the sidebar, family members, including Maya’s sister Maricris Drouaillet, said they had only heard about the affair from Larry. During the sidebar, Bowles objected to Martinez’s question, saying it wasn’t relevant that Maricris say she learned about it because she never confirmed it to have happened.
Martinez argued that it speaks to her credibility on the witness stand, telling the judge, “She said she just didn't care. She didn't really pay attention and she really didn't believe it. But if that many people or someone she trusted told her, why is she still not believing it that it is not true when so many people -- there is Larry, an investigation that went on, and then you have got May herself telling her that ‘He wants to cause trouble again for me by reporting me,’ and all of that stuff.”
Moring ended the sidebar by sustained the prosecution’s objection, saying the timeline was irrelevant along with whether she believed the affair was real or not.
After an objection from the media on Day 5 of the hearing, the judge called substantially fewer sidebars in private. Within hours of the objection, though, the prosecutor, defense attorney and judge went back and forth at length over what type of objection was appropriate before the judge cited case law and reframed the questions himself. He then turned to face the media sitting in the gallery and said, “Now you know why we’ve been having so many sidebars.”
Bonita Martinez
Some of the on-the-record sidebars featured arguments over objections lodged about Martinez's cross-examination of witnesses. Objections to questions that were outside of the scope of cross-examination, not relevant to the proceedings, vague or were compound questions were heard in open court. Moring’s frustrations with Martinez’s lengthy cross-examinations were on display during regular proceedings, but also evident during sidebars. including this exchange, which took place on Jan. 13.
Moring: “If you want to impeach the character of her being this loving mother by evidence that she was out drinking and left the kids unattended, fine, but I don't need to know all of the people on the trip. I mean, I just want it to be streamlined. And you can get to the point, if that is the point you want to raise.”
Martinez: “I tried to limit my cross-examination to streamline more. I just didn't want to not establish that she didn't know about it. I just wanted to make sure that she has knowledge about it.”
Moring: “Well, we don't have all day to get to it.”
The judge also seemed to chastise Martinez about her familiarity with the evidence in the case. That conversation started with Moring's concerns that text-message evidence shown in court was in different visual formats. Sometimes it appeared similar to what it looks like on a phone, while, other times, it was exported in a database document as text. The judge was satisfied with the prosecution’s explanation regarding formatting, but Martinez was not.
“I do have some concerns about the contents, your honor, because it's so numerous and massive," Martinez said in part. "One whole year of texting. There's no way that I'll be able to compare what I have that she provided versus the Excel sheets. That's what my concern is all about. She has it all in a different format, and in order for me to even decipher whether there [were] errors on the format of the Excel sheet, I would have to look at what she had provided earlier, and she's not using all of it…. It burdens me a lot, and I can't be listening to her question and listening to the answer and then trying to object and then trying to check. It's just an extreme hardship on the defense, your honor.”
Moring responded: “Counsel, this case is voluminous, and there is a lot of discovery, and you just need to be on top of it. If you're going to be representing him and doing a job — a competent job — then you just need to make sure that you have a mastery of the evidence and you've got to anticipate what is going to come in. And you've had this case for quite a while. We were supposed to do this preliminary hearing a year ago. I don't know if you had the discovery a year ago because, apparently, some of the discovery is coming in on a rolling basis, but if you had — if you've had this for a year, you should be on top of it."
That afternoon, another sidebar was held over Martinez’s attempts to block testimony that Larry had allegedly asked Maya’s brother Jaypie to help him find a hitman to go after the man she was having an affair with.
“I think it is relevant to the defendant's state of mind and his — it goes to motive, that he had a motive to, that he had such an outrage about this affair that he was willing to go to lengths to seek revenge on this other person and, in fact, that he blamed this other person for the demise of his marriage,” Bowles said in defense of letting the testimony in.
Martinez argued that that doesn’t mean it shows a possible motive why Larry would allegedly kill his wife.
“It's the wife, your honor,” Martinez said. “I don't know who because it's the other guy. I don't know today. There's this other guy. It's not clear and it's highly prejudicial and it's not targeting the wife.”
After hearing both arguments, the judge sided with the prosecution.
“I'll note this is a homicide case," Moring said. "You've raised the issue that he didn't even kill her, that she's alive.”
Martinez responded: “She's still alive. That's our position.”
The murder trial for Larry Millete is scheduled to begin in September.
