Judge reverses, orders constable held

— A federal magistrate judge decided Friday to detain James Weldon King, a Phillips County constable who authorities say is a felon who hoarded fully automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his home.

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U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Thomas Ray’s decision reversed his own earlier ruling to release King.

Ray said letters, arrest records and mental-health documents submitted by the government in the past two weeks convinced him that King, 50, showed signs that he is mentally unstable and would pose a danger to himself and others if he was released on bond.

“It is clear to the court that if Mr. King were placed on electronic monitoring and home detention ... it would in no way reasonably protect the community,” Ray said.

King will be detained while he awaits trial on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and possessing an unregistered firearm.

King was convicted of two felony counts of grand larceny in Jackson County, Miss., in the mid-1980s, court records show. Since then, he has been known to own and carry guns, federal agents have testified, and last year, he was elected constable of St. Francis Township.

King did not disclose that he was a felon when he ran for constable, and signed a pledge that he had no felony convictions. Under Arkansas law, felons cannot hold public office. They also can’t possess firearms under state and federal law.

King is not charged with any state crimes related to holding public office, and as of late Friday, no one had filed in Phillips County Circuit Court to have him removed from office, according to state court records.

The specific charges in King’s federal indictment, handed up Feb. 6, relate to the Mississippi convictions and to firearms found during a Jan. 30 search of King’s home.

That day, King greeted two FBI agents at the door in his pajamas with a .25-caliber pistol strapped to his ankle, according to court records.

Federal agents have testified that they found more than 35 firearms inside King’s home, including at least nine unregistered fully automatic AK-47 style rifles stashed in a storage room behind his house.

The rifles were in three large plastic tubes that appeared to have been buried at some point, federal agents say. Several partially assembled machine guns in violin cases also were found in King’s home. And agents found more than 32,000 rounds of ammunition at the house and King’s former shop.

Friday’s court appearance was King’s second detention hearing this month at the federal courthouse in Little Rock concerning the charges.

During the first hearing, an FBI special agent testified that King made paranoid comments to her during his arrest, including his fear that people had been shooting at him from helicopters flying over his home.

Ray found at the earlier hearing that without any medical documentation to show that King was mentally unstable, the testimony alone wasn’t enough to show King posed a danger if released. Ray then placed King on house arrest and electronic monitoring.

Ray later stayed his order after Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters filed a motion asking him to reconsider additional evidence, including arrest records and psychiatric evaluations that she filed with the court under seal.

On Friday, Ray said the new evidence painted a drastically different picture from the first bail hearing.

“Certainly there is information in these documents that he was suicidal and wanting to harm other people,” Ray said, referring to psychiatric records from January 2010.

“Mr. King was, quote, seen walking with a gun, thinking of killing people,” Ray read from one of the documents.

The government also presented correspondence between King and his ex-wife that included a threatening letter in which King “lists numerous people in there that he says he wants to kill,” Ray said.

Court records submitted to Ray show that King has been arrested at least 11 times in Helena-West Helena since his Mississippi convictions.

The arrests involved charges of terroristic threatening, assault, third-degree battery and disorderly conduct. King wasn’t convicted in seven of the cases. The other four cases, which are misdemeanors, were still pending Friday.

In Friday’s ruling, Ray chastised federal agents for not being more thorough in uncovering King’s arrests and mental-health history before the first bail hearing.

“This additional evidence is in no way new ... now we have the rest of the story, and the story that we know is serious,” Ray said.

The records are particularly troubling because King is accused of “possessing what can only be described as an arsenal,” Ray said.

Peters told the judge that officers with the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services office hadn’t been able to find all the documents associated with the cases. Court officials in Helena-West Helena had told them the files were transferred to Marianna, “which doesn’t make sense,” Peters said. King’s mental-health history wasn’t discovered until after the first hearing, she said.

Chris Tarver, King’s attorney, said during Friday’s hearing that he disagreed with the judge’s assessment of King’s mental stability, saying he didn’t think King needed to be mentally evaluated.

The mental-health records federal agents obtained contained several errors that Tarver said made him question their validity. He also noted that the records indicated that King denied that he wanted to hurt himself or others at the time doctors evaluated him.

King wasn’t a person prone to threatening behavior, Tarver said, echoing testimony by Janelle Tyner, a Marianna animal-control officer and friend of King’s.

Tyner said that in the three years she had known King, he had never appeared mentally unstable or threatening. King had never been anything but loving to his 6-year-old daughter, who stayed with him often, she said.

“She has been his whole world,” Tyner said.

Tyner also said she had never seen any firearms or ammunition in King’s home, which she visited weekly. That included a visit about a week before federal agents arrested King at his home.

After Tyner’s testimony, Peters called FBI Special Agent Ward Seale, who testified that King had numerous loaded firearms in his home when federal agents arrived with a search warrant.

Excluding the AK-47s in the shed, “at least 90 percent of the weapons we found at the house ... were loaded with one in the chamber,” Seale told Ray.

In response, Tarver said Seale’s testimony didn’t apply to any potential danger King posed while awaiting trial because federal agents had taken all of King’s guns and ammunition.

“I think that alleviates any danger to his daughter for being in a home where there are loaded weapons,” Tarver said.

Peters disagreed. “I think to the child alone, Mr. King is a danger when he’s leaving loaded firearms around with a 6-year-old,” she said.

Ray said that he didn’t think King would harm his daughter, but that his “severe mental issues” and delusions would pose “a serious danger to the community.”

Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/23/2013

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