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

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

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.

If that happened, it wouldn't be one case but a large number of cases.

It happened to me. When I was a yout', I was issued a traffic citation
by a patrol officer from a small suburb. Generalizing throughout the
United States (except where local government combines city and county
like San Francisco or the city is independent like Baltimore and St.
Louis), a municipality is precluded from prosecuting a felony but may
prosecute misdemeanors and petty crimes and non-felony traffic cases.

I showed up in court. The municipality had decided that day that they
weren't going to prosecute traffic cases. The village prosecutor and
police officers didn't show up. All cases were dismissed.

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, I'm not going to agree with your assumption that the prosecution
didn't take the case to trial lacking confidence in the outcome. No
criminal lawyer can ever assume slam dunk and must always be prepared
for the anticipated -- opposing counsel will question aspects of the
law on procedure and civil rights -- and the unanticipated -- a witness
changing his testimony, failure of discovery that was largely withholding
of evidence by the police but not the prosecutor. (Failure of discovery
that's more the fault of the prosecution than police can't be called
"unanticipated".)

This isn't Price on Law and Order, regularly proceeding to trial with
an absurdly weak case. I pointed out that this would have been a costly
case to take to trial, and it was particularly costly given that the crime
occurred two decades ago, and yes, that makes it even more difficult to
win. But it's not like the state's chances are improved with further delay.

As pointed out in the videos and news report, ALL Indiana counties had
underfunded their prosecutors. A state bill went no where that would
have kicked in a bit of state funding to county prosecutors. The
governor opposed it for general state budget reasons, not that it
matters given that it's the same set of taxpayers.

It was also pointed out that a study of the year 2019 by the state
association of county prosecutors, a year without a prominent murder
trial, recommended that Howard County have 23 prosecutors on staff, but
they had just 11.

I'm sticking with my original conclusion that this is a failure by the
county to properly address the cost of government. They are just doing a
lousy job.