News

SHELTON MURDER CASE DISMISSED

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, June 26, 2009 12:10 AM CDT

The Arkansas Supreme Court late Thursday dismissed the case against a capital murder suspect accused of running over his girlfriend with a tractor in 2007.

By dismissing the case, Glen Homer Shelton Jr. will be released. Shelton has been held at the county detention center since his arrest May 6, 2007.

In a 6-1 decision, the high court decided a Jefferson County circuit judge was wrong when he granted a mistrial for Shelton, now 46, of Jefferson County, charged with capital murder in the death of Melonie Hughes, 26, on May 5, 2007.

The court agreed with Shelton that the mistrial ruling was unnecessary, and therefore the state could not put Shelton on trial a second time without placing him in double jeopardy.

In his appeal, Shelton claimed that Circuit Judge Rob Wyatt Jr. should not have declared a mistrial after a jury had been sworn in to hear the case on Feb. 19, 2008, and said he was being tried twice for the same offense.

The state had contended that Shelton ran over Hughes with a farm tractor after she reportedly fired shots at him following an argument.

During the trial, Deputy Public Defender Tim Bunch represented Shelton.

“Melonie Hughes ran toward the highway (U.S. 425) and Glen Shelton followed her,” Bunch said in his opening statement. “He chased her off the property and when the tractor hit a ditch, he momentarily lost control and before he could bring it back into control, he had run over Melonie Hughes.”

Chief Deputy Prosecutor Kyle Hunter objected, claiming that the statement amounted to a change of the defense’s announced strategies, from self-defense to an accident, and that the jury would be prejudiced because, in his opening statement, Hunter had mentioned Hughes’ use of drugs and her previous attack on Shelton with a knife.

Hunter contended that those things would not have been mentioned had they known that the defense would claim an accident rather than self defense.

“The defense is self-defense,” Bunch said during a conference at the bench after the jury had been sent out of the courtroom. “And the prosecuting attorney, I believe, said that Shelton offered several examples of reasons for why his conduct occurred, and that it was an accident at some point when he ran over her, and that’s all I did was repeat them. That it was an accident at some point, but we’re still arguing self-defense.”

The high court said Hunter had originally raised the issue of an accident in his opening, saying that Shelton, after being arrested, gave several different explanations to sheriff’s investigators when he was questioned.

After a lengthy conference at the bench, Wyatt granted the state’s motion for a mistrial.

“I’ve also taken a couple of extra minutes to try and figure out how to admonish the jury,” Wyatt told both sides. “I know the model (jury) instructions say opening statements are not to be considered by the jury. But after we’ve gone on through two hours of voir dire (jury selection), through the state’s opening, and then we get down to the end and say, well, he lost control and ran over her, I don’t think there’s anyway to cure that.”

In the supreme court’s majority ruling Thursday, Justice Donald Corbin said “the state has not met its heavy burden of demonstrating that the mistrial was warranted by circumstances justifying overruling necessity because if any error or prejudice occurred in this case, it could have been corrected with curative relief such as an admonition or instruction to the jury.

“There was no forceful or compelling emergency such as illness or incapacitation of a juror, counsel, judge or witness that would make it impossible to proceed with the trial,” Corbin wrote.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Jim Gunther dissented from the opinion, noting that while the majority decided that the mistrial was not necessary, “this court has held numerous times that the trial court is in the best position to decide the issue of prejudice because of its first hand observations.

“I would accord a great deal of deference to the trial court’s determination that a mistrial was necessary in this case and would therefore affirm the denial of appellant’s plea of double jeopardy,” Gunther wrote.

Print this story   |   Email this story