Since the beginning of the year, the defense team of Hanme Clark, the man accused of murdering three people and wounding another on November 20, 2023, has increasingly been turning the screws on the District Attorneyâs and the Custer County Sheriffâs Offices for their failure to follow basic rules of sharing discovery with the defense team.
It started on March 21 when presiding Judge Laura Swan allowed a recross of witnesses that had taken place under former and now disgraced District Attorney Linda Stanley. While such rulings are rare, the punishment (known as a sanction in the courts) was to allow new cross-examination of some of the witnesses who responded to the shooting on Rocky Ridge Road, which is in northeastern Custer County. The sanctions were not a serious threat to the prosecutionâs case.
However, on Tuesday, May 7, the District Attorneyâs Office was dealt a much more serious setback to its case when Judge Swan ruled that Custer County Undersheriff Susan Barnes had errantly ordered two deputies to search the property and house of Hanme Clark without a valid warrant after the shooting took place.
Judge Swan cited testimony from former Custer County Sheriff Deputy Jason Salbato, which was given in April. Salbato recounted that the Sheriffâs Office had properly executed a search warrant of the property that Hanme Clark lived on with his partner Nancy Median-Kochis after the shooting. The problem was that the next day after the successful search warrant had been executed, Salbato, along with Deputy Pete Elliot, were searching for a cell phone in a field that they had been unable to locate that might have filmed the interaction between the victims and Hanme Clark. As the officers were searching the field where the shooting took place, they received an order from Undersheriff Susan Barnes to go and search the property for a second time.
Both officers told Undersheriff Barnes that they needed a new search warrant in order to enter the houses and property for a second time. However, according to the testimony given, Undersheriff Barnes ignored the concerns of the Officers and ordered them to search the houses and grounds for more evidence.
It was this action that concerned Judge Swan, as the constitution plus existing case laws clearly state that once a warrant is fully executed, a new one must be requested. The District Attorneyâs Office had argued that the warrant that was first issued was good for a 14-day period. However, Judge Swan retorted in her oral ruling that, âit was certainly not the intention of our founding fathers for a warrant to allow the law to come back for 14 days in a row until they found what they think they were looking for.â
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States requires that a warrant âparticularly describe the place to be searched.â Article II, § 7 of the Colorado Constitution requires that a warrant âdescribe the place to be searched … as near as may be.â At issue was that while search warrants may be valid for 14 days, once they are fully executed, a new one must be obtained before a second search is allowed. Getting a search warrant would have been easy to obtain, but for unknown reasons, Undersheriff Barnes decided to ignore the warning from her deputies.
Judge Swan stated that she had not come to her ruling lightly, but that after reviewing the case law and the testimony, she ruled that all of the evidence that had been collected during the second and illegal search order by Undersheriff Barnes could not be used in the upcoming trial in September. Judge Swan also ordered that the prosecution and defense work on the list of items that had been seized on the second search to determine what was to be suppressed.
It is not possible to know the importance of the evidence being suppressed, but it does represent a setback to the prosecution for sloppy work by the administration at the Sheriffâs Office. All cases include setbacks and the compiled evidence is not public and so it is not possible to assertain if anything in the now suppressed evidence had a major impact on the case.
This mistake by Undersheriff Barnes is considered a basic tenet of police work, and her deputies clearly understood that what she was ordering them to do was not legal. Barnes was sworn in as the Undersheriff in 2023 when newly elected Sheriff Rich Smith selected her. Barnesâs previous leadership experience was limited. She had been promoted to Sergeant in the neighboring city of Florence in 2022 and had started working at the Florence Police Department in 2021.
Sheriff Smith had been a State Patrol Officer stationed in Florence before winning the Custer County Sheriff election in 2022. The State Patrol Office is located within the same building as the Florence Police Department. It was at this time in 2021 that Smith and Barnes had met. Before Florence, Barnes had tangled with her former employer at Pikes Peak Community College, who had written her up for job violations (but did not fire her). Barnes resigned from that job but later sued in 2023, claiming workplace harassment, but she agreed to dismiss the case before it went to trial. In 2014, Barnes resigned after political turmoil, where she served as a part-time officer in the small community of Green Mountain Falls located just west of Colorado Springs.
After the hearing on the errant search warrant, the defense asked Judge Swan to allow Clark to waive his speedy trial rights, and the District Attorney’s Office did not object, and the Judge granted Clark’s waiver. This came on the heels of long-awaited testing that had been completed by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which has been severely backlogged with DNA and ballistics testing due to the discovery that one of its lead DNA scientists Missy Woods had falsified thousands of samples of DNA evidence over a period of 20 years. The delays meant that the prosecution and the defense had been waiting on the results of the testing until last week.
The trial was scheduled in June but has now been pushed back until September 22.
– Jordan Hedberg
