Time runs out on sex assault charge

On Tuesday, Circuit Judge Bill Wright dismissed charges against a Sarasota man who was accused of lewd and lascivious battery upon a 12-year-old fellow member of his Boy Scout troupe while on a 2007 outing in Jackson County.
Robert Brehm, 17 at the time, was accused of holding a knife to the throat of the youngster and demanding that the boy perform oral sex on him.
Assistant state attorney Greg Wilson said he plans to appeal the judge’s ruling in the First District Court of Appeals, but said he understood why Wright ruled the way he did.
Wilson is the fifth state’s attorney assigned to the case since the defendant was charge more than a year ago, and the second since Glenn Hess defeated former state attorney Steve Meadows and took office in January.
Wilson concedes that the failure of the state to bring the case to court in a timely fashion was the main cause of Wright’s ruling. The judge cited the defendant’s right to due process.
“I understand the court’s ruling, but I really think it’s a miscarriage of justice for the victim in this case, and I hope the appellate court will take a look at it,” Wilson said. “The father is understandably upset with the system.”
Wilson, like the father of the alleged victim, cited a long period of inaction by the state as the main reason the case did not proceed to trial.
“This is one where the state attorney’s office takes a black eye. It was a real lack of diligence in moving this case along,” he said.
Wilson says the failures occurred long before Hess, his boss, took over.
The clock started ticking on Brehm’s right to a speedy trial on July 25, 2008, when then-assistant state attorney Mark Sims filed the case in juvenile court.
The next action came in August 2008, when the arraignment was continued under circumstances not made clear in the court record, Wilson said.
The next action took place in September 2008, when Sims filed discovery in response to the defense attorney’s demand. That was the last action in the case until Hess took over in January of this year.
Brehm’s speedy trial clock — a 90-day period in juvenile court — expired in late October 2008.
Inexplicably, Wilson said, the defense apparently offered no motions in any attempt to have the charges dismissed back then.
Wilson is also at a loss to explain why the state took no action in the case before the clock ran down.
A couple of weeks after he took office, and long after the speedy trial window had closed, Hess assigned the case to Stan Peacock.
Peacock discovered some erroneous dates in the state’s original filing, corrected those, and was working on the case when he was re-assigned to Bay County July 9. That’s when Wilson inherited the matter.
The case had been proceeding along under Peacock even though time had run out, but then a new complication arose. Three days after Wilson took over the Jackson County office, the defendant turned 19 years of age. Wilson discovered this as he was preparing for an Oct. 13 trial date against Brehm on the juvenile charges.
By the time Wilson came on board, the speedy trial period in adult court, 170 days, had also expired.
The period of the state’s inactivity leading up to Tuesday’s dismissal has left the alleged victim’s father, Will Wright, enraged.
From the start of the case, Will Wright (no relation to the judge) acknowledges he’d been hounding the state attorney’s office to act. Time and time again, he said, he was met with excuses, promises or unanswered phone calls.
He’s got a civil suit in the works against the Boy Scouts and half-a-dozen others associated with his son’s ill-fated trip to Jackson County, but is fairly certain the state is immune. Wright is livid about that, and places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the local office.
“I’m as dark and cynical as a human being could be now,” Will Wright said. “All my suspicions about government employees are irrevocably confirmed. Worthless. Incompetent. Tabulating their state pensions and dreaming of the time they no longer have to pretend to work.”
The fact that his son cannot achieve closure pains him deeply, he said.
“I feel completely alone and isolated. My astute judgement and experience told me I had Laurel and Hardy working on the case, and it was confirmed today,” Wright said. “I cannot get my son back to the point he was before this happened, but at least with a successful prosecution, I could have said, ‘Son, the system may be slow as hell, but it works.’ I can’t say that now. He now believes that justice is a mass hallucination, a farce that fools believe in, that rules are made to be broken, that rules are for chumps.”