The Arkansas Supreme Court Thursday ordered a new trial for a condemned prisoner who admitted to the murder and mutilation of a homeless woman in Crawford County, ruling that he had been unable to rationally assist his attorney.
Rickey Dale Newman, 56, was convicted of capital murder in June 2002 and sentenced to death in the slaying of Marie Cholette, whose body was found at a homeless camp in Van Buren.
The high court unanimously found that Circuit Judge Gary Cottrell erred by denying Newman a new trial in July 2011, after his attorneys presented testimony from twodoctors who said Newman had several mental illnesses.
“After reviewing the entire record, we are left with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake was made … Taking everything into account, we are persuaded that the record overwhelmingly illustrates that Newman’s cognitive deficits and mental illnesses interfered with his ability to effectively and rationally assist counsel,” Justice Courtney Hudson Goodson wrote in a 29-page opinion.
In an interview with police about a week after Cholette’s death, Newman said he didn’t know anything about her murder and that he had left her with a group of men at the camp who he said were “crazy.”
In a later interview, Newman admitted to killing Cholette. In a written statement, Newman told police he was known as Renegade among rail riders, but becomes “Seaco” and kills people when he blacks out.
After Newman was arrested, he tried to plead guilty and waive all of his rights, but he was appointed a public defender, Robert Marquette, whom Newman tried to fire.
Newman later told the court that he would allow Marquette to examine witnesses during his trial, but he insisted that he be allowed to make a statement to the jury. A doctor from the State Hospital testified at another pretrial hearing that Newman was competent to stand trial.
During a one-day trial on June 10, 2002, Newman took the stand and told the jury that he “enjoyed murdering [Cholette] very much” and that “[t] he truth is, the only justice in this case is the death penalty.”
The jury found Newman guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to death.
After the Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and sentence, the lower court held a hearing to appoint Newman an attorney to represent him in a post-conviction appeal - a hearing that is mandatory in capital-punishment cases.Newman told the court he wanted to waive his rights to an attorney and to his appeals, which the court granted.
As Newman’s July 2005 execution date neared, federal public defenders asked for a stay and he later allowed them to ask the court to renew his appeals.
Newman’s attorneys first asked a federal judge to grant him a new trial, but they were directed to first exhaust their claims in state court.
Cottrell held a hearing March 10-18, 2011, and heard testimony from three doctors: Pablo Stewart, a forensic psychiatrist, and Ricardo Weinstein, a forensic neuropsychologist, on Newman’s behalf, and Clint Gray, a psychiatrist at the state hospital, for the prosecution.
Stewart found Newman’s mental illness resulted in the “inability to think clearly and rationally,” while Weinstein found that Newman had “significant cognitive deficits and brain dysfunction,” Goodson wrote in the opinion.
But Gray, who did not interview Newman and depended largely on letters he wrote before his trial, concluded that Newman could understand the proceedings and assist his attorney.
The judge relied on Gray’s testimony in denying Newman’s request for a new trial, stating that the doctor’s “opinion most appropriately coincides with the evidence thatthe Court considered during the hearing.”
But Goodson wrote that the letters Gray used were not “a fair gauge” to determine Newman’s ability to work with his attorney. The court had no choice but to grant a new trial, the justice wrote.
“In sum, we conclude that Gray’s opinion does not provide a basis upon which to find that Newman had the capacity to assist counsel with a reasonable degree of rational understanding,” Goodson wrote.
In other business, the court unanimously upheld Mississippi County Circuit Judge Cindy Thyer’s refusal to suppress evidence seized during a traffic stop of a rental car thatwas tracked by a GPS device.
Justice Jo Hart wrote that Raymond Wilson, who negotiated a guilty plea to trafficking cocaine and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, did not have standing to challenge a search or the placement of the GPS device because the rental agreement was not in his name and the rental contract prohibited anyone besides the renter from driving the car.
“Wilson had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the vehicle and no standing to challenge the search of the rental car,” Hart wrote.
The court also rejected Wilson’s claims that he was detained for an unreasonable amount of time during the traffic stop.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/17/2014