Judge Rules Delay Does Not Bar Trial

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – Willie Clyde Puckett had been in jail for less than a week in 1985 when he would ultimately tell a corrections officer that he did not want a cellmate.

Puckett, then 23, had been charged with aggravated rape involving a 3-year-old. He wanted to be alone, and his fellow inmate at the Sullivan County jail would not stop talking, he later told the officer.

So, according to statements he gave to a corrections officer the night of the incident, he forced his cellmate to write a suicide note, bound him in a bed sheet, hung him from a ceiling lamp, doused him with lighter fluid from a cigarette lighter he punctured with a coat hanger, and set him on fire.

“He talked all the time,” Puckett said in a statement on May 7, 1985, after initially telling officers his cellmate committed suicide. “I wanted to be by myself.”

Instead of going to trial, Puckett was found unfit, deemed a danger to himself and others, and involuntarily committed to state mental health facilities, where he has remained since.

But on Monday, 23 years after the alleged offense, Puckett appeared in court. And after a circuit court judge rejected the claim by Puckett’s attorneys that prosecuting him after so long violates his due process rights, the oldest untried murder case on the Sullivan County docket lurched uncertainly forward.

Puckett, a slightly built man with closely cropped brown hair and thick lenses, did not comment at the hearing.

Puckett remains at the Harold Jordan Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where he has been since 1999, pending a determination of his competency to stand trial. He has been diagnosed with mild mental retardation and a personality disorder, and has repeatedly been found unfit for trial with little hope of ever becoming competent, according to a review of court records.

Puckett spent nine years in a nonsecure facility, but was sent back to a controlled program after an incident in 1999 in which he allegedly attacked his roommate and threatened to kill him.

Over the years, psychologists have gauged his IQ from 52 to 67, and alternately likened his social and adaptive abilities to those of an 11- or 14-year-old child.
In 1988, after three years of “almost daily instruction,” the director of one mental health facility noted that Puckett had made “virtually no progress” toward understanding judicial concepts, and opined he was “not likely to become competent in the foreseeable future.”

In 1990, a different director from the same facility wrote that Puckett had made “only marginal progress due to his behaviors and thought disorder.”

In 1994, a state mental health official assessed Puckett’s progress this way: “Mr. Puckett understands simple cases of right versus wrong and he knows misconduct can have serious consequences. ... He lacks both the verbal ability and the trust to express his true thoughts to anyone in authority, including an attorney.”
Again and again, psychologists found Puckett incompetent.

But in 2005 when the directors of the Harold Jordan facility sought to transition him into a non-secure setting, asserting that the “benefits from institutional care had largely been maximized,” Sullivan County prosecutors revived their case against him by ordering an independent psychological evaluation.

The resulting evaluation, which was ordered and performed while Puckett was not represented by an attorney, is apparently the only one to find him competent, and has been challenged by Puckett’s attorneys as unconstitutional. The circuit court has not yet taken up the issue of Puckett’s competency.

Stephen Wallace, the county public defender who was appointed to represent Puckett following the evaluation in 2006, filed a motion that year to dismiss the charges. Prosecuting a defendant who for 20 years has been deemed incompetent to stand trial violates his due process rights, Wallace contends.

On Monday, Judge Robert Montgomery rejected Wallace’s motion, concluding that prosecutors had not caused a delay in the case to gain a “tactical advantage.” “The years in and of themselves do not cause actual prejudice,” Montgomery ruled.

But the judge did not comment on any potential prejudice against the defense in his decision, Wallace noted in an interview after the hearing. The defense attorney said that his client’s mental retardation, and the long period of time without the counsel of an attorney, posed problems in mounting a defense.

Wallace is seeking what is known as an interlocutory appeal – a procedure which routes the case to the criminal court of appeals before a trial in circuit court. This rule, a kind of detour in criminal procedure, can be invoked when an attorney raises an issue affecting the legal basis for a prosecution.

If the appellate court were to reverse Montgomery’s decision, that would end the prosecution. But Wallace must first obtain the permission of Montgomery for an appeal, and then petition the appellate court to rule on the issue. He could also appeal directly to the appellate court if Montgomery denies his appeal at the circuit level.

A hearing is set for Sept. 25.

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