The state’s highest court on Tuesday rejected the appeal of a former Waterboro man serving 20 years in state prison for injuring a woman with a homemade stun gun and attempting to kidnap her as revenge for her role in his child custody case years earlier.

Christopher T. Hall, 52, appealed his 2017 conviction for kidnapping, assault and aggravated assault, arguing that the evidence at his 2017 trial was insufficient to convict him.

But the Maine Supreme Judicial Court rejected his arguments in a ruling released Tuesday that upheld the sentence. The decision written by Chief Justice Leigh I. Saufley said that Hall’s reading of the statute is incorrect, and that the legal definitions given to the jury at trial were in line with the law and that their verdict was not in error.

Christopher T. Hall

Hall’s earliest possible release date is 2036, according to the state Department of Corrections.

According to court records, Hall lured the victim to a home in Arundel under false pretenses, and when she arrived, Hall posed as an elderly man by wearing a wig and using a walker, but quickly attacked her when she opened her car door. Hall used a commercially available stun gun attached to a cane to repeatedly shock her on her legs and inner thighs, and tried to cover her mouth to muffle her screams.

But the woman fought Hall, and he fled in a waiting van before police intervened. Hall was indicted on the charges a short time after the attack.

The woman, who was working at the time of the attack as a professional mediator, previously served as a guardian ad-litem during a custody dispute involving Hall’s children. The plot to kidnap the woman and hold her for ransom was a bid for revenge over what Hall perceived as an unjust decision in the custody case years earlier.