Raymond Lester is escorted from Hancock County Superior Court in Ellsworth in February after being sentenced to 48 years in prison for the 2022 murder of his former girlfriend Nicole Mokeme in Acadia National Park. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

A Portland man who was found guilty of murdering his girlfriend in Acadia National Park is appealing his conviction to Maine’s high court.

Raymond Lester, 38, was convicted of knowing or intentional murder in the death of Nicole Mokeme following a weeklong trial last year. He was sentenced to 48 years in prison.

Nicole Mokeme Photo courtesy of Stephanie Kornegay

Lester’s appeals attorney told the Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday that the jury was not given a special instruction on whether Lester’s intoxication at the time could have meant he was acting recklessly instead of intentionally (which would have merited a lesser manslaughter charge.)

It was a noteworthy shift from Lester’s defense at trial, in which his lawyers suggested the state couldn’t even prove he was the one who hit Mokeme.

Mokeme was found dead early on the morning of June 19, 2022, at Acadia, according to trial testimony. They were attending a Black Excellence retreat that Mokeme organized for Black, brown and Indigenous people to relax with their friends and families at the park.

After hitting Mokeme, police said Lester immediately fled to Mexico. He showed up at a Red Cross station in Cancun a month later, saying he had been robbed and admitting that he was wanted for arrest in the United States.

At trial, Lester’s attorneys argued the state couldn’t prove it was definitely him who hit Mokeme. There were no eye witnesses to the collision and police were never able to find the car.

But in filing his appeal, Lester accepts that he did hit Mokeme. His court-appointed appeals attorney, Rory McNamara, is now arguing that his trial was unfair because the judge didn’t incorporate an “intoxication instruction.”

People from the retreat testified at his trial that they saw Lester drinking vodka from the bottle while driving in the hours leading up to Mokeme’s death.

“The evidence clearly established that Ray had been drinking all night,” McNamara argued in court records. “There is not much evidence tending to establish that Ray intentionally or knowingly, rather than recklessly, struck Nicole with his vehicle. … It is quite possible that the jury, properly instructed, would have been of the opinion that drunk driving – even ‘chasing’ Nicole to scare her (rather than hit her) – constitutes a conscious disregard of the risk that Ray could hit her.”

McNamara also challenged the judge’s instructions for proving Lester’s state of mind, a point Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill challenged, saying that those same instructions “have been around for a really long time.” He also questioned whether it was fair for Superior Justice Robert Murray, who oversaw the trial, to consider Lester’s flight to Mexico after the murder at sentencing, since that occurred post-offense.

Assistant Attorney General Leanne Robbin defended Murray’s actions and the sentence. She noted Wednesday that Lester’s defense at trial, and his objections now, are contradictory.

“This appears to be a case where trial counsel and appellate have different theories of the case,” Robbin said in court. She also pointed out that Murray decided to let the jury also consider manslaughter, even though Lester never made that request himself.