An Arkansas trial judge has dismissed all charges against former death-row prisoner, Rickey Dale Newman (pictured), setting him free on October 11 after having spent nearly 17 years in custody following the February 2001 murder of a transient woman in a “hobo park” on the outskirts of Van Buren, Arkansas. Newman became the 160th person since 1973 to be exonerated after having having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Newman, a former Marine with major depression, chronic posttraumatic stress disorder from childhood abuse, and an IQ in the intellectually disabled range, was seriously mentally ill and homeless at the time he was charged with murdering Marie Cholette. He was convicted and sentenced to death in June 2002 after a one-day trial in which the court permitted him to represent himself. No physical evidence linked Newman to the murder, but at trial a prosecution expert falsely testified that hair found on Newman’s clothing came from the victim. Newman also told the jury he had committed the murder and asked them to impose the death penalty. He subsequently sought to waive his appeals and be executed. The Arkansas Supreme Court initially held that Newman had been mentally competent and granted his request to drop his appeals. However, four days before his scheduled execution on July 26, 2005, Newman permitted federal public defenders, including his current counsel, Julie Brain, to seek a stay of execution. DNA evidence on the blanket on which the victim was found excluded Newman, and the federal defenders obtained DNA testing of the hair evidence that disproved the prosecution’s trial testimony. They also discovered that prosecutors had withheld from the defense evidence from the murder scene that contradicted what Newman had described in his confession. A federal court hearing disclosed that the state mental health doctor had made significant errors in administering and scoring tests he had relied upon for his testimony that Newman had been competent to stand trial. The Arkansas Supreme Court subsequently ordered new hearings on Newman’s competency and on the evidence the prosecution had withheld from the defense. After those hearings, it wrote that “the record overwhelmingly illustrates that Newman’s cognitive deficits and mental illnesses interfered with his ability to effectively and rationally assist counsel” and overturned Newman’s conviction. In September, it issued another ruling barring the use of Newman’s incompetent confessions in any retrial. On October 2, Brain submitted a letter to the court saying that “Mr. Newman has now been incarcerated for over 16 years for a murder that he did not commit” and that the Arkansas Supreme Court had found that the invalid statements he had given while mentally incompetent were “the only meaningful evidence against him.” In response, special prosecutor Ron Fields submitted letter to the court asking that charges be dismissed. Fields wrote that, without the confessions, prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction and “it would be a waste of tax payers money to retry [Newman].”
(D. Hughes, “Former Arkansas death row inmate freed after 16 years in custody; charges dropped in mutilation case,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 12, 2017; J. Lovett, “Death row inmate Rickey Dale Newman walks free; 2001 murder charges dropped,” Southwest Times Record, October 11, 2017; K. Sherrell, “Arkansas Death Row Inmate Walks Free After Nearly 17 Years In Prison,” KFSM 5 News, October 11, 2017.) Read the Arkansas Supreme Court decisions granting Mr. Newman an evidentiary hearing and overturning his conviction. See Innocence, Intellectual Disability, Mental Illness, and Prosecutorial Misconduct.
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