Re: County's mismanaged budget leads to dropped murder charges in cold case

On 2025-04-25 12:56 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

This is a Steve Lehto video from an article based on a Fox59
Indianapolis local tv news report.
 Here's the article with video clip from local news broadcast
 https://fox59.com/news/indynews/indiana-murder-trial-dismissed-due-to-staffing-crisis-and-busy-court-schedule/
 and Lehto's video
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVH6V183Bng
 In Kokomo in Howard County, Indiana, police found the murdered man
11/15/2006; a witness said the perpetrator entered and attempted to rob
a home, then killed the victim who tried to stop it.
 Police followed up on tips over the years, then announced in Febrruary
2023 that they were close to bringing charges. A man and a woman were
indicted 5/26/2023 and were then arrested on warrants 5/30/2023.
 After separate trials were scheduled and delayed, a judge dismissed all
charges (related to the robbery) against the woman on April 7; later,
her bond was dismissed. On 4/22/2025, charges related to the robbery
and murder were dismissed against the man. All charges were dismissed
without prejudice, which means that they can be refiled, no matter how
impractical to do so.
 The prosecutor simply lacked the personnel to proceed to trial and were
behind on plenty of other cases.
 This didn't come out of nowhere. This is a small county, population
84,000. A prominent murder trial like this will cost a fortune to
prosecute, and the prosecutor really wasn't keeping up with smaller
cases in the ongoing case log.
 It's been two years since the indictment, so that was plenty of time for
the prosecutor to have laid out his budget and explained to the county
board how much this trial would cost, and it would have given him time
to hire specific personnel to clean up the ongoing mess of backlogged
cases and attorneys and support personnel specific to the big case.
 Not to mention, the public defender will need more staff too.
 It's unfortunate that these things cost real money, but what choice is
there? Sweeping it under the rug as happened here was the wrong
decision.

It might be forgivable to drop a prosecution if the crime was something minor, like shoplifting, but dropping a murder seems unconscionable.
I think we have to assume the evidence wasn't sufficient to make this a slam-dunk victory for the prosecution otherwise it might have gone ahead anyway. If it was clearly NOT going to be an easy victory, I imagine that whoever decides whether to prosecute "did the math" and felt that it was going to be too expensive to proceed given the distinct possibility that the suspects would not be convicted.
Or maybe someone paid off the district attorney to let this one slide and rationalize it with a cost-benefit analysis.
--
Rhino