The Most Surreal Murder Trial in America
Arkansas prosecutors withheld evidence in Tim Howard’s first trial that sentenced him to death. After that was overturned, they’re doing it again.
ASHDOWN, Ark. — How many stabs should a state get at trying a defendant? How much evidence can it fail to provide the defense and still call it a trial fair?
In Little River County, Arkansas, on the state’s border with Texas, Tim Howard is about to find out. He is being tried a second time for the murders of his best friends 18 years ago. In the first trial, prosecutors withheld key evidence that could have set him free. And now, with the same judge as before, it appears evidence has gone missing again.
Judge Charles Yeargan, who convicted Howard in 1999, only to overturn that conviction in 2013, is beyond exasperated.
“It’s frustrating for me to sit here and listen to all this,” he told the prosecutor in court last week, after hearing how much evidence is missing. “As you know, this court took a giant leap to order this new trial.
“We all agreed that there would be full and complete discovery. Now we’ve got all these holes that you’ve come up here with. It’s very frustrating—I swear— it’s frustrating to this court.”
Howard, who’d sat quietly at the hearing, spoke up at that point. “It frustrating to me!” he said.
The judge admonished him to be quiet, but I was glad he said what he did. He’s been jailed for almost 18 years, 14 of them in isolation on Arkansas’s death row.
I have known Howard for 12 of those years and believe he is innocent. In fact, in ways I find Howard’s case more troubling than that other infamous Arkansas case I’ve written about, the one whose defendants became known as the West Memphis Three.
Howard’s attorneys recently raised the claim that he is being exposed to double jeopardy—a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights—because, from the time of Howard’s arrest until now, state officials have not provided his defense attorneys with evidence as required by law.
Yeargan didn’t address the double-jeopardy argument. He said jurors could weigh the importance of the missing evidence at Howard’s new trial the last week of April.
Howard, who is black, was 30 in 1999 when he was convicted and sentenced to death in the murder of Brian and Shannon Day, his two best friends, who were white. All three were doing drugs.
Witnesses at Howard’s first trial said Brian had been dealing and that Shannon was worried shortly before the murders because Brian owed his dealers a large sum of money.
Brian Day was found beaten and shot to death inside a U-Haul truck on a farm owned by one of Howard’s relatives. When police went to notify Shannon, they found her body inside a closet in the couple’s home. A pane of glass was on top of her, but the fingerprints on it aren’t Howard’s and they’ve never been identified.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/10/the-most-surreal-murder-trial-in-america.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon
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