Court Opinion

ID: 9857081
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 07:15:04.378144+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:37:58.909995
License: Public Domain

BISTLINE, Justice,
specially concurring:
Having joined the opinion of Justice McDevitt, my only purpose in writing is to exclaim at the new turn in the continuing prosecution of Stuart for the death of a child. This 1981 alleged torture murder was the first charged in almost one hundred years of Idaho territorial and statehood law and order. There was no prior torture murder case, thus making it all the more irrational that Stuart was so charged when consideration is given to the fact that he could have been charged with ordinary first degree murder.
A great concern, then, was why Stuart was charged with torture murder, and only that. Another great concern is the district judge’s creation of absurd obstacles which thwarted Stuart’s counsel, Robert Kinney, in his attempts to obtain a fair trial for Stuart. Those obstacles, which have been mentioned in previous opinions, included:
giving defense counsel a paltry $300 with which to investigate the alleged crime; changing venue to Moscow, Idaho, the judge’s home town;
advising the jury that a then-present gap in Idaho statutory law allowed him to not sequester the jury. And he did not se*936quester it, leaving the jurors exposed to daily provocative news articles for the entire length of the trial;
not ruling on a defense motion pertaining to introduction of evidence which was requested so counsel would be able to muster and prepare defense witnesses;
making the absolute misstatement at sentencing that defense counsel had stipulated that the judge could consider and utilize testimony of state witnesses at Stuart’s preliminary hearing. The witnesses were women who had lived with Stuart at various times and testified that each of them had been subjected to physical mistreatment; however, the judge was not the magistrate who had conducted the preliminary hearing.
The district court declared testimony at the preliminary hearing to be evidence which the state could properly present to the jury in order to establish Stuart’s purported propensity to torture women, and his putative propensity to torture a small boy. It cannot be forgotten that the district judge, in his own courtroom, was told by the prosecutor that Stuart could not receive a fair trial if his attorney was not provided with proper resources to investigate. At trial the evidence adduced included far more as to Stuart’s alleged mistreatment of women in the past than it did to striking the child in the stomach which caused enough damage that the child, according to the charge of the information, “sickened and died.”
Thus it came about at trial that Mr. Kinney had to defend Stuart on actual information charges of first degree torture murder, and at the same time defend against the non-charged crimes, including a hospital rape of one of the women witnesses, and an unrelated attempted drowning of another, all because the district judge had ruled this evidence as being necessary to prove torture murder. Now, as Paul Harvey would say, here is the rest of the story. The witnesses who Mr. Kinney could not locate, for perhaps some reason other than his lack of time and funds, and could not adequately prepare against, are now belatedly learned to be — from the mouths of conscientious citizens — the same women the whereabouts of whom had been discussed in wire-tapped conversations between Stuart and an attorney who was advising him from western Washington. The district judge in his sentencing decision said that Stuart had been found by him— just him, and not the jury — to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of whatever those women testified Stuart had done to them.
While I do understand that in ordinary circumstances further proceedings in district court as directed should be had, here the circumstances are extraordinary to the extent that a grand jury should also be convened to inquire into the matter of not unlikely lawbreaking and interference with the due process of law by law enforcement officials, and perhaps others who were interested in seeing that Stuart was convicted and executed. In sum, I agree with the directions on remand as stated by Justice McDevitt, and at the same time believe that only a grand jury will be able to ferret out every last bit of evidence as to what was being clandestinely done.