LITTLE ROCK — Thirty-five years ago, 18-year-old Keith Allen Deaton of Batesville pleaded guilty to a capital-murder charge in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Now it turns out that the woman he admitted murdering may not have been murdered. But the medical evidence supporting that assertion can’t be heard because it was discovered after the relevant Arkansas statute of limitations had expired.
At a hearing to begin at 9 a.m. today in a Little Rock federal courtroom, a judge will consider whether a recent U.S. Supreme Court case permits him to retroactively “toll,” or time-freeze, the statute to allow the newly discovered medical evidence to be heard.
For Dana Reece, the Little Rock attorney who is pursuing an opportunity to present evidence of Deaton’s innocence, “We’re very hopeful that the circumstances are ripe for justice to be done. We believe that this is a great opportunity to show that the justice system does work.”
For the state, represented by Assistant Attorney General Kelly Hill, the Supreme Court case, Holland v. Florida, decided in June 2010, doesn’t apply in the Deaton case.
“It is our office’s responsibility to defend lawful criminal judgments,” spokesman Aaron Sadler said last week. “In this matter, courts have repeatedly rejected the defendant’s claims.”
Under the Holland decision, the statute of limitations for pursuing a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel can be tolled only if the actions of Deaton’s original attorney amounted to more than “garden variety,” or “excusable,” neglect, creating an “extraordinary circumstance.”
Deaton’s guilty plea in January of 1977 was a logical choice for him at the time. He had, after all, burglarized a home next door to his parents’ home and, during the breakin, hit the resident, 26-year-old Linda Joan Reed, on the forehead with a hammer.
The young mother was hospitalized for two weeks with a skull fracture but was presumably healed upon her release. Doctors were puzzled when she returned to the hospital two weeks later, complaining of headaches, and died before they knew how to treat her.
Suddenly, Deaton found himself facing a capital-murder charge and the possibility of a death sentence unless he pleaded guilty in return for the only other penalty available: life in prison without the possibility of parole. So he took his attorney’s advice and accepted his sentence.
What neither he nor his attorney knew at the time was that Dr. Rodney Carlton, the medical examiner who performed Reed’s 1976 autopsy, didn’t have access to her hospital records during the autopsy. They would have cast some light on the mystery of her death by showing that during her first hospitalization, she had a severe, antibioticresistant urinary tract infection that went untreated, that she had pneumonia in both lungs and that she may have inadvertently been given too much Valium during her second hospitalization.
Carlton’s autopsy report cited the cause of death as “respiratory arrest due to or as a consequence of the unknown — possible Valium overdose.” Although he didn’t list her cause of death as homicide, prosecutors decided there was no other explanation. After all, complications from the head wound may have constituted “the unknown.”
Nineteen years passed by the time Carlton looked at Reed’s hospital records for the first time, in 1995, at the repeated urging of Deaton’s family, and immediately realized that the death could in no way have been related to the head injury. Although he tried to correct the record, too much time had lapsed for subsequent attorneys to effectively argue that Deaton deserved a new trial because he hadn’t been adequately represented during his guilty plea.
That’s because Arkansas’ statute of limitations for challenging convictions based on the ineffectiveness of original counsel had expired. Adding to the confusion, Reece said, was that the Legislature was constantly tinkering with various statutes of limitations at the time.
Facing the inability to pursue a new trial on the grounds of ineffective counsel, Deaton’s subsequent attorneys focused on petitioning governors — first Jim Guy Tucker and later Mike Huckabee — for clemency. Carlton wrote letters to both governors to try to explain how the absence of Reed’s medical records during the autopsy had created a now-obvious false impression that she had died as a result of the blow to the head.
Both petitions, however, were denied.
Deaton’s older sister, Cynthia Houlyard, now of New Jersey, said she was told that no one even reviewed the thick file she had helped assemble. After all, the Arkansas Supreme Court had already declared that Deaton and his family hadn’t been diligent enough in meeting deadlines for pursuing appeals.
Houlyard said her brother had no other history of violent crimes except for three other home burglaries in the same middle-class neighborhood of ranch-style homes, during the same time period. She said her family always doubted her brother’s guilt because of that and because of his insistence that he simply didn’t believe he had hit Reed hard enough to kill her.
Deaton’s original attorney was a family friend who was inexperienced in criminal law and apparently never investigated Reed’s death, Houlyard and Reece said.
Houlyard said that at the time of the burglaries, her brother lived across town from their parents’ Batesville house. She was away at college in Bethany, Okla., studying piano, and their youngest sibling, Scott, who is four years younger than Deaton, lived at home.
Deaton’s and Houlyard’s father died in 1999. Their mother is now 73.
Houlyard said that as time went by, she worked for several years as an executive secretary, eventually in a New York medical facility, where she learned to decipher codes and notes in medical charts. She said that allowed her to finally understand some aspects of Reed’s medical records, which she had obtained three years after her brother’s imprisonment, and prompted her to urge Carlton to examine the records himself.
Now a medical transcriptionist, Houlyard said the records show that doctors at the Batesville hospital released Reed before receiving the lab results identifying a dangerous infection that was brewing. Otherwise, she said, they would have recognized the situation as serious enough to require Reed’s continued hospitalization.
Houlyard said notes in the file showed that that lab tests identifying the infection were performed after Reed complained to nurses about unexplained bleeding, prompting them to send a urine culture for testing.
After Reece was hired to represent Deaton in 2007, she pursued a petition in federal court for a new trial, citing Deaton’s failure to have effective counsel during his guilty plea in violation of his constitutional rights. But U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Jones, now retired, recommended that U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller throw out the petition because it was filed too late. He cited changes in federal laws to limit habeas petitions, which was part of an effort to eliminate trivial claims and speed up the appeals process.
But after Jones’ recommendation, which Miller accepted, dismissing the petition, the Holland opinion recognizing “equitable tolling” came out, prompting Reece to ask Miller to reconsider the dismissal. In light of the new court decision, Miller granted the request.
If he decides in Deaton’s favor on the statute of limitations issue, a second hearing would have to be scheduled to air the medical evidence. Reece said that although Carlton, the medical examiner, has since died, she obtained a death-bed affidavit from him that firmly reiterates that the blow to Reed’s head wasn’t a fatal injury.
Reece has also obtained affidavits from other physicians and pathologists who agree with Carlton, and expects to present expert testimony if given the chance at a subsequent hearing.
“The law is so strict on meeting deadlines at the appellate level,” Reece said last week. “That’s the tragedy of the criminal-justice system. You can have people in prison who are actually innocent, but if they miss their deadline, they can’t get out.”
“We just want somebody to listen,” Houlyard said. “Trying to get somebody to listen all these years has just been almost unbearable.”
“Why,” she asked, “is there no statute of limitations on murder, but there is a statute of limitations on proving their innocence?”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/29/2012