A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit accusing Russellville police of conspiring to pin the 2005 killing of Arkansas Tech University student Nona Dirksmeyer on her boyfriend, Kevin Jones.
In September 2013, then-U.S. District Judge James Moody Sr. dismissed Jones' lawsuit "with prejudice," meaning Jones could not refile it in that court. Jones appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
The appeals court cited Arkansas' three-year statute of limitations for "state malicious prosecution claims" and upheld the dismissal on the ground that Jones, who sued in December 2011, had not filed the lawsuit within that time frame.
The Dec. 15, 2005, bludgeoning death of Dirksmeyer, 19, in her Russellville apartment remains unsolved.
In 2007, a Pope County jury in Russellville acquitted Jones, now 28, of murdering his girlfriend, a frequent beauty-contest participant.
In 2012, police arrested another man -- Gary Dunn, who had been a neighbor of Dirksmeyer's -- and charged him in her murder. Dunn was tried twice, but both juries deadlocked. A judge later dismissed the murder charge against Dunn.
Jones' lawsuit alleged that the defendants -- Dunn, former Russellville Police Chief James Bacon and Russellville police detective Mark Frost -- had violated Jones' constitutional rights by conspiring to withhold evidence and falsify information to have Jones prosecuted. The lawsuit also had named the city of Russellville as a defendant.
In a four-page opinion, the appellate court noted that Jones filed the lawsuit more than four years after his acquittal.
"Jones admits that he filed his suit outside the applicable statutes of limitations, but he argues that he was entitled to equitable tolling based on fraudulent concealment," the court wrote. "He asserts that the defendants concealed a portion of Frost's handwritten field notes which incriminated Dunn and which should have been disclosed to the state prosecutor."
The conspiracy, Jones contended, came to his attention only after the statute of limitations had expired.
The appeals court, however, wrote: "Even viewing the evidence here in the light most favorable to Jones, Frost's field notes cannot reasonably be read to contradict the report that he provided to the state prosecutor.
"Furthermore, even if Frost had fraudulently attempted to conceal his field notes, that action would not have tolled the statute of limitations," the court added, because testimony had indicated that Jones could have discovered the contents of Frost's notes more than three years before the lawsuit was filed.
State Desk on 10/31/2014