'01 murder charge stays; Arkansas justices deny tardy-trial claim

The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an appeal by Rickey Dale Newman to dismiss his 2001 capital murder charge because of what his attorney contended was the violation of his right to a speedy trial.


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Associate Justice Karen Baker, who wrote the opinion, denied a writ of certiorari that Newman filed in May through his court-appointed attorney, Julie Brain of Philadelphia.

Brain asked the state's high court to overturn Crawford County Circuit Judge Gary Cottrell's denial of her motion to dismiss the capital murder charge. She stated in her motion that the state failed to take Newman to trial within a year after the state Supreme Court, in February 2014, overturned Newman's 2002 conviction and death sentence because he was mentally incompetent to assist his attorney in preparing for his trial.

The court ordered Cottrell to restore Newman's fitness for trial and retry him.

Baker wrote that even though the year deadline for retrying Newman passed in February 2015, it took Cottrell until Nov. 4, 2015, to determine that Newman was fit for trial. Only after that determination was Cottrell allowed to resume criminal proceedings against Newman.

"Because the period during when Newman was not competent to stand trial is excludable for purposes of calculating speedy trial, we hold that the circuit court did not err in denying Newman's motion to dismiss," Baker wrote.

It took Cottrell so long to make his determination because of the difficulty in evaluating Newman. A month after Newman's case was returned to him, Cottrell ordered a mental evaluation of Newman.

But, on Brain's advice, Newman refused to cooperate with doctors at Arkansas State Hospital, according to court records, leaving them unable to report on his competence.

Cottrell issued another order in November 2014 that Newman undergo a mental evaluation, but the doctor could not render a decision because Newman again wouldn't cooperate, Baker wrote in the opinion.

In April 2015, Baker wrote, Cottrell again ordered a mental evaluation for Newman. In his order, Cottrell said that despite Newman's and Brain's contentions that Newman was competent to stand trial, there was no evidence presented to him to confirm the claims.

Even though Newman would not cooperate in the third evaluation, doctors concluded that he was competent based on their observations that he appeared to have a rational understanding of his case, could interact productively with Brain and seemed to understand the facts of the case and points being raised in his defense.

Based on testimony from the doctors in a hearing, Cottrell found Newman fit to proceed to trial, Baker wrote.

In her motion to dismiss, the opinion said, Brain had contended that the only time excludable from the speedy trial time clock was between when the evaluations were ordered and when the evaluation reports were filed in court.

Brain calculated that only 249 days since the state Supreme Court's initial ruling in 2014 were excludable from the speedy trial calculation and that the deadline to try Newman should have been Sept. 22, 2015.

Newman has been in custody since his arrest in February 2001. He was charged with murdering and mutilating Marie Cholette, 46, in a transient camp on the edge of Van Buren.

In a one-day trial in June 2002, in which he acted as his own attorney, Newman told the jury that he killed Cholette and asked to be sentenced to death.

After he was condemned, Newman successfully waived his appeals and was scheduled to be executed July 26, 2005. Four days before his execution, attorneys on his behalf asked for and received a stay. A federal judge granted his request to reinstate his appeals, which led to the state Supreme Court's finding that Newman was incompetent in 2014.

Back in Crawford County Circuit Court, Brain filed a second motion Nov. 4 to dismiss Newman's capital murder charge, again contending violation of Newman's right to a speedy trial. She argued that even if the time until Nov. 4, 2015, was excludable, as Baker ruled Thursday, the speedy trial period since then has expired.

Still pending in the case is the completion of a hearing on a defense motion to suppress statements that Newman made to police and prosecutors.

A date for a four-day trial on the capital murder charge had been set for Monday but was dropped from the docket pending the outcome of Brain's appeal to the state Supreme Court.

State Desk on 12/02/2016

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