LITTLE ROCK — A federal judge heard a full day of testimony Thursday from four people connected to a Batesville man who has served 35 years of a life sentence for a murder that may not have occurred.
Those testifying in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge Brian Miller included prisoner Keith Allen Deaton’s mother and sister, as well as two of the five lawyers who have represented him in the past 35 years.
When the hearing resumes at 9 a.m. today, another lawyer is expected to testify, as well as Deaton himself.
The goal of the hearing is to determine why state and federal petitions to have Deaton’s 1977 guilty plea thrown out were filed after deadlines for filing them had expired.
If Miller finds that any of Deaton’s attorneys were ineffective to the point that their actions constituted an “extraordinary circumstance” leading to the delay, Deaton will be allowed to present medical evidence that he says casts doubt on the “murder” victim’s cause of death.
Deaton, who will turn 54 on April 20, has been in prison since late 1976, when he was 18. He was initially imprisoned for admitting to three burglaries and a theft.All stemmed from break ins at houses in his parents’ Batesville neighborhood.
In early January 1977, he suddenly found himself facing a new charge of capital murder after one of the burglary victims, 26-year-old Linda Joan Reed, died.
Deaton had hit Reed in the forehead with a hammer while burglarizing her house. Although she was released from the hospital in seemingly good health after treatment for a skull fracture, she was readmitted two weeks later - four weeks after the hammer blow - on complaints of headaches. She died on her third day of hospitalization.
Assuming the hammer blow was to blame, Deaton pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence on the advice of attorney C.D. Bennett of Batesville, now deceased, who said Deaton was likely to receive the death penalty if he went before a jury.
But Reed, the mother of at least two children, may not have died as a result of the head injury, several medical experts have since declared under oath.
Defense attorney Dana Reece of Little Rock and other defense attorneys after Bennett and before her have pointed to cryptic medical records indicating that Reed may have been given an overdose of Valium during her second hospital stay.
Medical records that weren’t available to the original medical examiner who performed Reed’s autopsy, Dr. Rodney Carlton, also indicated that during her first admission she had a severe urinary tract infection and then developed pneumonia, but wasn’t treated for either.
Carlton, now deceased, wrote in support of a 2006 request for clemency for Deaton that he didn’t know until seeing Reed’s hospital records years later that the head injury had nothing to do with Reed’s death.
“I believe that this 1976 death was caused by an intervening event, and that Keith Deaton’s actions were not a factor in this death,” Carlton said in a letter to then-Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Prosecutors filed a murder charge in spite of the fact that Carlton’s autopsy report never labeled Reed’s death a homicide. Carlton later said the report was incomplete “because necessary medical information was incomplete and unavailable.”
Deaton’s mother, Bonna Joann Deaton, and his sister, Cynthia Houlroyd, testified Thursday that the family didn’t know at the time that Deaton pleaded guilty that both Bennett and Newport attorney Steven Howard, who replaced Bennett after Bennett suffered a stroke, were inexperienced in criminal law.
Howard testified Thursday, agreeing that his firm handled strictly corporate law, but testily denied that he did any work on Deaton’s case other than research he was told to do by a partner at the firm, Phillip Hout, who has since died. Howard said he was fresh out of law school at the time. He couldn’t explain why Hout’s name wasn’t on any court records in Deaton’s case and that the documents listed his name as counsel instead.
Howard, who was hired to pursue post-conviction relief for Deaton, testified that he couldn’t remember if he requested Reed’s autopsy report or followed through on a request for her toxicology results.
Miller also heard from Tom Carpenter, who represented Deaton for about six years after Deaton’s parents fired the Howard-Hout firm, and who described numerous efforts to gather credible testimony that could definitively show that the head injury didn’t cause Reed’s death.
Carpenter, now the longtime city attorney for Little Rock, left private practice for the city position in 1988, turning the Deaton case over to his brother, attorney Larry Carpenter, who represented Deaton until Reece took over in 2006.
Larry Carpenter is expected to testify today.
The judge said at the beginning of the hearing that Deaton’s attorneys had until April 24, 1997, to file a federal petition for relief, but the petition wasn’t filed until Aug. 6, 2008.
Miller is reconsidering his 2010 rejection of Deaton’s request for an evidentiary hearing because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling the same year allowing judges to retroactively halt the relevant statute of limitations to hear newly available evidence in certain circumstances.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/30/2012