More than a week after a judge ruled that the Faulkner County Jail can legally continue to hold an 18-year-old probation violator until prison space becomes available, attorneys for the inmate indicated Tuesday that the matter is near finished, at least from local lawyers' perspectives.
"At this point, with a correct judgment and commitment order filed, we can at least say that the department of correction knows he exists," attorney Frank Shaw said of his client, Myles Leonard Taft Jr.
Shaw's client has been jailed at Faulkner County Detention Center for nearly 14 months, after he pleaded guilty in March 2007 to violating a sentence of probation originally issued for hurting two detectives in an incident at school when he was 15.
Shaw filed a new judgment and commitment order on Tuesday that contained none of Circuit Judge Rhonda Wood's handwritten markings that Shaw and Prosecuting Attorney Marcus Vaden said could've further halted Taft's presumably short stint at the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Taft was sentenced by Wood in March 2007 to five years' ADC, though Taft wrote in a letter to the circuit clerk on March 20 this year, "I have been sitting here since Feb. 26, 2007, waiting to go to ADC. So altogether I have been waiting a year and (six weeks)." Taft says he pleaded guilty under the impression that he was "supposed to (actually) do no more than 10 months," though Faulkner County has paid for and facilitated his incarceration the entire time.
Vaden said last week that Taft could spend a "very short time" at ADC, so long as members of the parole board are informed by a proper judgment and commitment order that Taft has been continuously held at the county jail since he was arrested for probation violation in February 2007. Aside from issues brought up by Vaden last week about Wood's own markings on the judgment and commitment order filed April 3, Shaw and co-counsel Jeff Rosenzweig of Little Rock said they were concerned about the order being entered "nunc pro tunc" from March 14, 2007. "Nunc pro tunc" means "now for then," and according to Shaw, ADC officials don't normally accept this style.
In order to avoid what Rosenzweig described at court as "any train wrecks at ADC" in which prison officials would be unaware of how long Taft has actually been incarcerated, the third page of the corrected judgment and commitment order filed Tuesday was changed to say, "The defendant has been in the Faulkner County jail continuously since Feb. 26, 2007," where the first order had said, "This order is entered nunc pro tunc from March 14, 2007."
The most recent squabbles over the filing of a proper judgment and commitment order in Taft's criminal case coincided with dispute between Vaden and Wood over whose office was actually responsible for failing to file the order in the first place last year, which resulted with a judge at civil court granting a motion by the attorney general's office to quash Vaden's subpoena against Wood, whom Vaden had planned to question from the witness stand during a habeas corpus hearing as to what actually happened during Taft's revocation hearing in March 2007.
Wood had written in an eight-point press release that during the 2007 revocation hearing, "I did ask an attorney in court to prepare the judgment and commitment order, and the order was not prepared."
A transcript of the hearing released upon an open records request showed that Wood and deputy prosecutor Susan Weaver had a conversational misunderstanding as to how the correct order would be handled. Both judge and prosecutor were at the time new to their posts, according to Vaden, who called the misunderstanding "an honest mistake."
Since March 14, 2007, a document titled "Revocation of Probation Order" produced by Wood and styled as if it were a juvenile court document had been on file at the circuit clerk's office instead of a typical adult judgment and commitment order. Officials with ADC typically honor an adult judgment and commitment, but not juvenile court orders.
Circuit Judge David Clark announced at the habeas hearing last week that he was denying Taft's request for immediate release since an albeit facially flawed judgment and commitment order had been filed. Clark recommended that Wood recuse from the rest of the man's criminal case, "in the interest of making it go as smooth as possible." Vaden said after the hearing that he will ask Wood to recuse from any other adult cases that fall in her division.
Wood, who has been a juvenile judge since appointed to the fourth circuit division in 2006 by then-Gov. Mike Huckabee, is a candidate in next month's judicial elections, and has said all along that Taft's petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed earlier this month was actually about attorneys' political motives. On Monday Wood requested that Administrative Circuit Judge Ed Clawson accept the case, following motions by both Shaw and Vaden for a corrected judgment and commitment to be filed.
Vaden wrote in his motion that after his office prepared the judgment and commitment order filed on April 3, "incorrect changes were made" by Wood, and he said his office "will await direction from the Court as to the provisions she wishes to be" in the order.
Wood wrote in her transfer order filed Monday that she was requesting Clawson to accept the case, "Due to the allegations in this matter." On Tuesday Wood hadn't replied to calls or e-mails asking to which allegations she referred.
On Tuesday night, Taft was still at Faulkner County Detention Center awaiting transfer to ADC.
(Staff writer Daniel Doyle can be reached by e-mail at daniel.doyle@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1253)
