Phillips County drops 197 felony cases

— Prosecutors dropped nearly 200 Phillips County felony cases Wednesday, citing law enforcement failures to serve fugitive warrants in a timely manner.

The move cuts in half the number of fugitive cases and came days after officials there received word that a special judge would hear civil cases for a week in August to help clear a court backlog.

In addition, a court hearing revealed that some individuals have been jailed beyond a deadline that the law sets for prosecutors to file formal charges against them. In at least four instances, the accused had to be released.

During a Wednesday morning hearing, Circuit Judge Richard Proctor read off fugitive-case numbers, uninterrupted for 15 minutes, as he granted motions to drop the charges.

In signing the first order — one for dismissal of a 1995 forgery case — Proctor read aloud the reason.

“Order to dismiss without prejudice due to a fugitive bench warrant issued … that has never been served,” he said.

The motions read nearly the same for the other 196 cases, the vast majority of which involved nonviolent felony charges that had lingered for years, copies obtained by the

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

show.

In some cases, fugitive warrants weren’t served for more than a decade, with the longest still-active warrant dating back to September 1996, court records show.

In an interview, 1st Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Fletcher Long said the nearly 200 cases speak for themselves.

“They are what they are,” Long said. “Witnesses are missing. And, obviously in cases that are 8 years old with a warrant outstanding, before you even look at it, you’ve got a problem.”

The motions, all made by Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Todd Murray, came after Murray reviewed the nearly 400 fugitive warrants in Phillips County.

Most of the cases involved charges of theft, forgery, burglary and lower-felony drug offenses.

A handful of the simultaneously dropped cases involved Class Y felonies, the state’s most serious offenses, which carry terms of 10 years to life imprisonment.

Some of the Class Y felony cases were among those identified by the Democrat-Gazette in a story published Sunday.

The newspaper found that a third of the county’s most serious fugitive cases faced dismissal for the reasons Murray cited in his motions to drop the lesser charges: fugitive warrants weren’t served.

The newspaper found that at least 35 defendants wanted on fugitive warrants in Class Y felony cases had been stopped by police for traffic offenses, arrested on misdemeanor charges or appeared in Helena-West Helena District Court.

Although wanted for failure to appear in Phillips County Circuit Court, those 35 remained free largely because Phillips County Sheriff Ronnie White hadn’t entered fugitive warrants into state and national law-enforcement databases for at least 24 years.

If the warrants had been entered into the Arkansas Crime Information Center (ACIC) or the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) databases, many of those named in the warrants would have been arrested as police encountered them.

Instead, the state missed opportunities to serve the warrants, and that time counted against the year that the prosecution has to try a case, according to Rule 28 of the Arkansas Rules of Criminal Procedure. The rule outlines how to compute time for speedy-trial purposes.

In an interview late Wednesday, Murray said he couldn’t prosecute the nowdropped fugitive cases in the condition they were in.

In some cases, he said, witnesses weren’t available to testify. Those witnesses included some of the officers who were arrested last October in the FBI-led drug-trafficking and public-corruption investigation dubbed Operation Delta Blues.

“There were cases where officers who were indicted were involved,” he said. “Others, the fugitive warrants had been outstanding for some time and weren’t viable.”

In all of the cases, Murray cited unserved fugitive warrants as reasons for dropping the cases. In a handful, he also noted other reasons, such as witnesses who could not be located, court records show.

Murray declined to say whether he planned to refile any of the cases, the majority of which were dropped by a nolle prosequi motion, a declaration by prosecutors that they don’t intend to pursue the case while reserving the right to refile charges within a year.

He said he would be reviewing cases over the next few weeks to determine if other cases should be dropped before the next court term, scheduled to begin July 30.

SPECIAL JUDGE

During that term, Proctor will devote five weeks to hearing criminal cases, while retired Circuit Judge John Lineberger will hear a week of civil cases in the federal building in Helena-West Helena.

An attorney since 1968, Lineberger served as a chancery judge in the 4th Judicial Circuit from 1975 until 2001. He also served as the director of the Criminal Procedure Institute at the University of Arkansas and is a past president of the Arkansas Judicial Council.

In an order issued June 14, Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Hannah appointed Lineberger to hear civil cases for a week starting Aug. 13.

Hannah’s order was in response to a request by Judge Ben Story, the administrative judge of the 1st Judicial Circuit, which includes Phillips County.

“After rearranging our trial schedules as much as possible, we have concluded that we need to have a special judge assigned to take one week of Judge Proctor’s regular civil term in Phillips County, thereby opening up an additional week, which Judge Proctor can devote to his criminal term there,” Story wrote in a letter to Hannah dated June 12.

In the letter, Story said the judge was needed because of the county’s criminal-case bottleneck. In Phillips County, about two of every three active felony charges had been pending for more than two years in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

Arkansas Supreme Court communications counsel Stephanie Harris said the Administrative Office of the Courts will conduct a review of the docket to see if Phillips County Circuit Court needs additional assistance after Lineberger concludes his week of cases.

Details of the review weren’t available Wednesday evening but will be worked out before the term later this summer, she said.

JUDICIAL MISCOMMUNICATION

Meanwhile, court hearings this week revealed other problems in the Phillips County judicial system.

For instance, at least four men taken to circuit court Wednesday had been jailed for more than 60 days without being formally charged.

Arkansas law requires that prosecutors file formal charges within 60 days after a defendant’s arrest if the person remains in jail.

If that deadline isn’t met, defendants should be released “unless the prosecuting attorney establishes good cause for the delay,” according to Rule 8.6 of the Arkansas Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Also, documents delivered to the court Tuesday showed that paperwork on some initial court appearances held in Helena-West Helena District Court wasn’t forwarded for filing in circuit court.

As a bailiff escorted the four detained men into the courtroom, public defender E. Dion Wilson carried a list noting their names and arrest dates, which dated back to December.

“Amidst all this chaos, these young men are in jail. There’s no reason they should be in jail,” Wilson said.

In response to Wilson, Proctor directed Long to review a stack of documents detailing initial district-court appearances and bail information on the men and more than 60 others.

The files came from the Helena-West Helena Police Department.

A Police Department clerk delivered the documents to the court Tuesday, Proctor said.

Proctor said the clerk told him the documents “have been delivered to the deputy prosecuting attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office, and nothing’s been done.”

The judge then directed Long to look into the matter and called Helena-West Helena Police Chief Uless Wallace to testify before the court.

During his testimony, Wallace confirmed that the documents were forms detailing initial court appearances, commonly called Rule 8 hearings, held by the city’s district court. Copies of the forms and the Police Department’s investigative files are routinely delivered to Murray’s office, he said.

“You’re telling me that there’s a case file ready to go, right now?” Long asked the chief.

“Right now,” Wallace responded.

“If I take you to Todd’s office right now, there wouldn’t be a problem?” Long asked, referring to Murray’s office.

“No problem,” Wallace answered.

Long, who agreed to look into the matter, said he and Murray have had problems before with files not making it to the prosecutor’s office.

“We cannot file charges if we don’t know they exist. We’ve got to have a file to file charges,” Long said. “We’ve had this conversation for five years.”

“Apparently it’s been going on more than five years. Apparently it’s been going on a long time,” Proctor responded.

Late Wednesday, Murray said he was still reviewing his documents to determine if he had received any files that haven’t yet been filed in circuit court.

“I have just about gone through the list. I can tell you this, there’s not a big stack of files that have just been sitting over here,” he said by phone from his office.

Murray located some files but said others still hadn’t made it to his office.

“They haven’t been given to me, and I can’t answer why they weren’t given to me,” he said. “I want to have a definite answer on every one of these.”

Wallace said his staff was making additional copies of some files to provide to Murray and would start delivering copies of initial court appearances held in district court to Circuit Clerk Lynn Stillwell’s office.

Proctor said he expected Long to report back with his findings.

“We’ve got to find out what’s going on. All these Rule 8s, have they gone to court? We’ve got 67 Rule 8s that have not been filed just like these four here that we’ve discovered,” Proctor told Long.

Proctor later agreed to release the four detained men.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/21/2012

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