A capital murder charge against Rickey Dale Newman, who faces a retrial after his conviction and death sentence were vacated by the state Supreme Court in 2014, has been amended to first-degree murder, according to Crawford County Circuit Court records.
Special prosecutor Ron Fields of Fort Smith amended the charge last week. He said Wednesday that when he served as prosecuting attorney, he would not file capital murder charges unless he was seeking the death penalty.
Since the state is no longer seeking death against Newman, Fields said, he decided to refile the charge as first-degree murder. He said a first-degree murder charge also would give a jury more leeway in deciding on a sentence if Newman is convicted.
The penalty for capital murder is life in prison or death. The punishment for first-degree murder ranges from a term of 10 to 40 years in prison, which would allow for parole eligibility, or life. In Arkansas, a life sentence does not allow for the possibility of parole.
Fields denied the suggestion that amending the charge was a prelude to a plea agreement with Newman. Newman, 59, has been in custody since his arrest days after the Feb. 7, 2001, slaying and mutilation of 46-year-old Marie Cholette at a transient camp in Van Buren.
Crawford County Circuit Judge Gary Cottrell earlier this month scheduled Newman to go to trial on the murder charge on Feb. 6.
A hearing is scheduled for Jan. 23 and 24 on a motion filed by Newman's attorney, Julie Brain of Philadelphia, to suppress statements he made to authorities around the time of his arrest in 2001. The hearing began in December 2015 and resumed in mid-January, but its completion was delayed when Brain filed a motion on Jan. 28 to dismiss the murder charge, claiming a violation of Newman's right to a speedy trial.
The Arkansas Supreme Court on Dec. 1 upheld Cottrell's denial of Brain's dismissal motion. But before that ruling was issued, Brain on Nov. 4 filed a second motion to dismiss, again claiming a speedy-trial violation. Cottrell has not ruled on that motion.
Newman was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death after a one-day trial on June 10, 2002. Newman, acting as his own attorney, told jurors that he killed Cholette and wanted to be sentenced to death.
The Supreme Court granted his request to waive his appeals and be executed. But four days before his scheduled July 26, 2005, execution, Newman asked for a stay, which a federal judge granted after hearing evidence questioning Newman's mental competence.
On Jan. 16, 2014, the state Supreme Court ruled Newman was incompetent and vacated his capital murder conviction and death sentence.
The court ordered Newman returned to Crawford County to be rendered competent and retried.
It took multiple attempts to mentally evaluate Newman because of his refusal, at Brain's instruction, to cooperate with doctors at the State Hospital.
Cottrell ruled Newman competent on Nov. 3, 2015. Brain later filed the motion to dismiss, claiming the state didn't retry Newman within a year of the Supreme Court's 2014 ruling. Cottrell denied the motion, saying the effort to determine Newman's competence was excluded from the speedy-trial deadline and that Brain's instructing Newman not to cooperate in the mental evaluations was the main reason for the delay.
Brain's second motion claimed the speedy-trial violation was the state's failure to try Newman from the time Cottrell ruled Newman competent on Nov. 3, 2015, to her filing of her motion on Nov. 4, 2016.
Metro on 12/22/2016