Opinion ID: 852383
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Harold D. Buntin's post-conviction relief case.

Text: Buntin was convicted of a robbery and rape that occurred in Indianapolis on August 4, 1984. The victim, who was working at a dry cleaning business, testified that a man came in around closing time and asked for an order under a name she understood to be Button. When she could find no order under that name, he asked for an order under the name of Evans or Harris. When the victim's back was turned, the man put scissors to her throat, took money from the store's register and from the victim, and had intercourse with the victim, still with the scissors at her neck. The victim was not sure whether the man ejaculated. Seminal fluid collected from a vaginal swab of the victim was tested using the technology of the mid-1980s. It was determined that the person who contributed the semen was a secretor [2] with type O, Rh positive blood. The victim saw Buntin several months after the attack in a supermarket and identified him as her attacker. Buntin was arrested and charged with rape and robbery. At his trial, evidence was admitted that Buntin was a secretor and could have contributed the seminal fluid. Buntin asserted an alibi defense, but when he learned the State had evidence that he was in Indianapolis at the time of the attack, he fled to Florida. He was convicted of rape and robbery in absentia in 1986 and sentenced to 50 years incarceration. While in Florida, Buntin lived under the name of David Evans (Evans being the last name of a grandmother and uncle) and was convicted of seven armed robberies. Buntin was eventually extradited from Florida and began serving his Indiana sentence in 1994. In 1998, Buntin filed a Petition for Post-Conviction Relief in Court 5 based upon DNA evidence not available during his trial and upon ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Commissioner Broyles presided over Buntin's post-conviction hearing on March 16, 2005. [3] The new DNA evidence established that Buntin was not the contributor of the seminal fluid collected from the victim after the crime. By April 18, 2005, Buntin's attorney, Carolyn Rader (Rader), and the State each submitted proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, with proposed Orders, to Commissioner Broyles, and she took it under advisement. Approximately four months later, in August 2005, Commissioner Broyles told Rader she intended to work on the Buntin case and asked Rader for a diskette containing Rader's proposed findings, which Rader's staff promptly delivered to Court 5. On August 11, 2005, Buntin wrote a letter to Court 5 inquiring about his case. Records from the Marion County Clerk's Office indicate that someone from Court 5 requested the Buntin file on August 25, 2005. Rader sent an email to Commissioner Broyles at the end of September 2005 inquiring about the status of case. On September 30, 2005, Buntin sent another letter of inquiry to the court. Records from the Marion County Clerk's Office indicate that someone from Court 5 requested the Buntin file again on October 25, 2005. The Clerk's records indicate the file was not found in that office's possession. On November 11, 2005, January 13, 2006, and April 20, 2006, Buntin wrote three more letters to Court 5 inquiring about his case. Rader sent an email to Commissioner Broyles at on April 20, 2006 inquiring about the status of case. In addition, Buntin's family made numerous calls to Court 5 asking about the case. None of the inquiries about the status of the case were answered. The evidence indicates that Commissioner Broyles signed an order granting Buntin post-conviction relief on May 20, 2006. Commissioner Broyles testified that she agonized over her decision to grant PCR to Buntin. She believed the evidence strongly supported the jury's finding of guilt and the new DNA evidence did not exonerate Buntin because the victim testified that her attacker may not have ejaculated. Nevertheless, Commissioner Broyles concluded the new DNA evidence casted sufficient doubt on the reliability of the original jury verdict that Buntin deserved a new trial. Although Commissioner Broyles signed the order in 2006, she inadvertently retained the typewritten year 2005 from the proposed order Buntin's attorney had provided in 2005. She attached a post-it note to the order with instructions for processing it. The post-it note included reference to an incomplete date, namely 05-20-0. The order was not processed at that time by the Court 5 staff and/or the deputy clerk assigned to Court 5. On January 8, 2007, Buntin filed a complaint with the Commission against Commissioner Broyles concerning the lengthy delay in any ruling in his case. The Commission's counsel, Meg Babcock, contacted Judge Hawkins during the first week of March 2007 to inquire about the matter. Judge Hawkins reported that the Buntin file could not be located but that court staff was looking for it. He told Ms. Babcock he would report back to her. Thereafter, staff members of the Marion County Clerk's Office conducted an extensive search and could not locate the Buntin file in the Clerk's office. Then, without explanation, the Buntin file appeared mysteriously on a desk in Court 5's offices on or about March 6, 2007. No staff member assigned to Court 5 in March 2007 has admitted being the person who found the Buntin file or the person who first received the file from the person who located it. On the evidence presented, the Masters opined that the most likely scenario is that the staff member to whom Commissioner Broyles gave the signed order with directions to process it forgot to do this, put the file aside, and forgot the file until Ms. Babcock's call about ten months later. Then to cover up the mistake, the staffer put the file on the desk where it made its mysterious appearance. When Judge Hawkins opened the Buntin file after it was located, he found an order granting Buntin's petition for post-conviction relief, which was signed by Commissioner Broyles and dated May 20, 2005, along with the attached post-it note and the a diskette containing the order. Judge Hawkins noted the signed order in the file contained some odd typographical errors apparently caused by the electronic transfer of the original document. [4] Therefore, he inserted the diskette into his computer, corrected some of the errors, and reprinted the order, retaining the original signature page dated May 20, 2005. On March 8, 2007, the court issued the order granting Buntin's petition for post-conviction relief (Buntin PCR Order), which was dated May 20, 2005, but made it effective March 8, 2007. [5] Judge Hawkins then gave control over the Buntin file to that Court 5's deputy bailiff, Stephen Talley (Talley). Neither the replaced pages of the original order nor the diskette can now be located, although the post-it note found on the original order remained in the file attached to something else. In addition to issuing the Buntin PCR Order on March 8, 2007, Judge Hawkins and Commissioner Broyles issued a Notice Explaining Delayed Ruling on Petition for Post-Conviction Relief (Notice) in which they reported, among other things, that Commissioner Broyles had signed an order granting PCR relief on May 20, 2005, that the Buntin file had been archived without the order being processed, and that the file had been retrieved from archives. Although the Judge and Commissioner believed these statements at the time, they proved later to be inaccurate. Although Judge Hawkins told the Commission's counsel in early March that he would report back to her, he did not do so until the Commission's counsel sent him a follow-up email on March 21, 2007. In his email response to the Commission on that date, Judge Hawkins referred the Commission to the inaccurate March 8, 2007 Notice for an explanation of what had happened in the Buntin matter. In addition, Judge Hawkins told Ms. Babcock: In the normal course, when someone is waiting for a ruling, they call or write the court. The attorneys didn't write or call. Petitioner may have called, but he certainly didn't write. Any letter he might have sent would go into the file after being examined by one of the judicial officers in this court. As noted previously, however, both Buntin and his attorney had in fact contacted Court 5 in writing on several occasions and all inquiries were unheeded. The five letters from Buntin to the court written before March 2007 (save for one loose page with a post-it note reading Letter was found loose in back of [the Buntin] file) could not be located in the Buntin file, in Court 5's Can't Find File file, [6] or elsewhere, although the CCS for the case documents their receipt. On May 23, 2007, Judge Hawkins sent a letter to the Commission along with copies of the Buntin PCR Order and the post-it note that had been on the unprocessed order. As mentioned previously, the post-it note had an incomplete date of 5-20-0. Bailiff Talley made the copy of the post-it note Judge Hawkins sent to the Commission. Talley wrote on the copy: 5/20/05 Judge, printed out a copy of the Postit [sic] note, but the date didn't print well so I rewrote down and initialed it. Talley made this notation without checking with Commissioner Broyles. Talley's statement that there was a problem with copying the date was simply false. Relying on Talley's note, Judge Hawkins repeated this erroneous information in his letter to the Commission. After the Buntin PCR Order was issued on March 8, 2007, Judge Hawkins gave it to bailiff Talley, who prepared a minute sheet so the order could be entered on the Chronological Case Summary (CCS) for the case. Judge Hawkins testified he thought the order was taken care of at that point, but for some reason Judge Hawkins could not explain, no one entered the order on the CCS until March 27, 2007a delay of nearly three weeks. The deputy clerk at the time testified she would input minute entries within a day, sometimes two, after she received them from a court, which suggests the hold-up was in Court 5 and not in the Clerk's office. Further, Indiana Post-Conviction Rule 1, Section 6, requires a court, after granting post-conviction relief, to enter any supplementary orders as to arraignment, retrial, custody, bail, discharge, correction of sentence, or other matters that may be necessary and proper. Judge Hawkins agreed that after the Buntin PCR Order was issued on March 8, 2007, Buntin returned to the legal status of not guilty, and the court should have ordered him returned to the Marion County Jail and set a bond. No action in this regard, however, was taken. It was only after members of Buntin's family called Court 5 inquiring about the case that Judge Hawkins scheduled a hearing for April 20, 2007. [7] At the hearing, the State elected not to retry Buntin on charges based on events nearly 23 years in the past. Buntin was therefore released on April 20, 2007. In the course of the Commission's investigation into the whereabouts of the Buntin file, Talley sent an email on June 7, 2007, to Ms. Babcock stating, I called down to [the Clerk's office's archives] and they located the file, but I can't recall if it was me or Master Commissioner Broyles that went and physically got the file. On August 2, 2007, Talley told the Commission that Commissioner Broyles went down to archives and retrieved the file. He said he remembered Commissioner Broyles with the Buntin file in her hand in March 2007, and then she went into Judge Hawkins' chambers. On August 23, 2007, Talley told the Commission that he did not call archives to request the file, he assumed it was in archives because it was not anywhere in the office, and he was just shocked that the file was found. He said he had earlier assumed Commissioner Broyles had retrieved the Buntin file from archives because he recalled seeing her with the file in a hallway near an elevator that goes down to old records. When pressed, he stated he had just assumed the fat file she was holding was the Buntin file. The Commission sent Talley's statements to Judge Hawkins on September 28, 2007, which should have alerted Judge Hawkins that the prior representations in his March 8, 2007 Notice about the file having been archived and retrieved from archives were based on incorrect information. Judge Hawkins, however, did not conduct any further investigation on his own as to where the Buntin file had been and how it was located. The Masters accepted, as does the Court, Judge Hawkins' and Commissioner Broyles' testimony that they personally did not do anything to disturb the Buntin file or to remove items from it after it was located. The Masters found it probable that a staff member who had control of the file may have decided to cleanse the file, perhaps removing matters that he or she deemed incriminating. Regardless of how the items were lost, the fact that Judge Hawkins did not immediately report the file's discovery and his actions to the Commission opened the opportunity for an unidentified person to remove or lose items of relevance to the Commission's investigation.