WOODSTOCK — A judge has denied an Upper Valley man’s bid to suppress statements he made to police before he was arrested on child sexual abuse and pornography charges as a trial in the more than three-year-old case is set for spring.

Wayne Miller, most recently of Hartford, has been held without bail in Vermont state prisons since late 2021 when he was charged with 14 counts of child sexual abuse and possession of child pornography. He is currently at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vt., according to the Department of Corrections website. Jury selection in the case is scheduled to begin May 8 in Windsor Superior Court.

Miller, 37, ran a youth mentoring program based in White River Junction and featured his own addict-to-recovery story as testimony in helping others stay sober before cyber tracking software led investigators to trace child sexual abuse material to his email addresses.

In 2023, Miller’s attorney filed a motion with the court seeking to suppress statements he made to police in response to questions about the illicit images traced to his email addresses investigators asked him when they arrived unannounced at his home in Hartford.

During a 45-minute interview in a second-floor bedroom, Miller told police he was struggling with addiction to child pornography and had just returned from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center where he had been hospitalized for several days because he was thinking of suicide, court documents show.

In their motion to suppress, Miller’s attorneys argued that their client’s statements to police should be inadmissible because they were given during a “custodial interrogation” without the defendant having been warned of his Miranda rights. Miller’s attorneys also contended that neither the statements nor password to open his phone he provided to police were voluntarily given.

Following two days of oral argument last August, Windsor County Superior Court Judge Heather Gray in January denied Miller’s motion to suppress the statements he made to police when they showed up at his home to question him and concluded the neither the statements nor the password for his phone he provided to police were involuntary.

Gray — who took on presiding over the case when former Windsor Superior Court Judge John Treadwell was rotated to another county — in a 14-page opinion found that police had explicitly informed Miller multiple times during the interview that he was not under arrest, not in custody and did not have to talk with them.

Those repeated assertions by police satisfied Gray that any information obtained during the interview with Miller is lawful. The circumstances under which police interviewed Miller did not meet the definition of being “in custody,” she wrote.

In her opinion, Gray concluded that Miller “was not in custody for purposes of Miranda when he was interviewed” and therefore what he said to police could not be suppressed.

Although the record shows that police utilized “soft techniques” when interviewing Miller, evincing concern and empathy over his plight to elicit information, Gray noted that such psychological techniques are allowable under the law.

“Law enforcement may use some psychological tactics in eliciting statements from an individual, as long as the tactics are not ‘so manipulative or coercive that they deprived (the defendant) of his ability to make an unconstrained, autonomous decision’ to provide the challenged statements,” Gray wrote, quoting Vermont state case decisions.

Again, Gray said her reivew of the record did not show police had exceeded the legal limits of interviewing.

“The preponderance of evidence demonstrated that Mr. Miller’s free will was not overborne during the interview,” Gray concluded.

Miller’s motion to suppress was one of a litany petitions and counter-petitions filed between the defense and the state’s Attorney General Office as they wrestle over which materials, statements and testimony can be admitted or blocked in the case.

The long list of legal block-and-tackle motions seeking a judge’s approval or denial is the main reason the case remains ongoing more than three years since Miller’s arrest in December 2021, according to court records.

Miller’s defense team over the past three years has filed various motions to limit the scope of what the state can admit to bolster its prosecution. For the most part, those motions have been denied, court records show.

No trial date has yet been set, although typically trials begin shortly after a jury is selected. The majority of criminal cases end in plea agreements, which often happens in the weeks or even days ahead of the scheduled trial.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.