The chief magistrate in Walker County, Ga., said prosecutors should have warned her office if they wanted to hold a vehicular homicide defendant in jail.
Sheila Thompson told the Times Free Press her staff did not know in advance that Mitchell Taylor Horton's first appearance hearing would occur last Saturday afternoon. More importantly, she said, they didn't know prosecutors wanted a judge to hold Horton without bond.
Instead, Magistrate Kela Spence gave Horton a $10,000 bond. Investigators say he ran off Chickamauga's North Marbletop Road the morning of Jan. 30 and killed Horace Cribbs, who was trimming a friend's front yard. Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson said Horton then drove away and hid the car at an acquaintance's house. Acting on a tip, Chattanooga police found him the next night.
Cribbs' friends told the Times Free Press that staff in the district attorney's office told them last week they would know when a judge decided on Horton's bond. But they learned Tuesday morning that Spence already set the bond. The friends were angry, believing $10,000 was too low and that Horton might try to run away.
Thompson said Cribbs' family complained to Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney Herbert "Buzz" Franklin's office Tuesday morning. Franklin's staff, in turn, asked the magistrate's office to rescind Horton's bond. He was still behind bars at that point. Thompson has now set a bond hearing for Feb. 16.
On Tuesday afternoon, Franklin told the Times Free Press in an email, "There was a bond mistakenly or accidentally granted by the magistrate court without notification to us or the victim's family."
But after reading an article about the issue Wednesday, Thompson called the Times Free Press to object to how Franklin cast the situation. She said Franklin's staff should have contacted her office last week, before Horton showed up in front of a judge. She said Spence did not know Horton avoided police for almost two days when he stood in front of her Saturday.
"All we can do is set [the bond] by what we've got in front of us," Thompson said. " Nobody said, 'Can we do a bond hearing? Or can we do conditions? Can we do other things?' We don't know any of that."
The backstory notwithstanding, Thompson said she could not say whether $10,000 is a reasonable bond for a defendant charged with vehicular homicide.
"There's no set bond schedule," she told the Times Free Press. "I didn't look at his file. I didn't see his file. I don't know what his criminal history looks like. I can't answer that."
Franklin did not return a call or email seeking comment on Thompson's statements Thursday.
Magistrates hold first appearance hearings inside the Walker County Jail around 2 p.m., Monday through Saturday. They tell defendants what charges they face and set their bonds, unless the defendants are accused of certain exempt crimes such as drug trafficking, rape or murder. In those cases, only a superior court judge can set the bond.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys can attend first appearance hearings, lobbying the magistrates for higher or lower bonds. In this case, Franklin's office asked on Tuesday for a bond hearing. A bond hearing is similar to a first appearance hearing, Thompson said. Its main function is to give lawyers some flexibility, in case they want to argue about a bond at a later time.
In most cases, Thompson said, a magistrate will not schedule a bond hearing without a request for a lawyer. The magistrates also don't know whom they will see in the jail every day, though detention officers usually usher in people arrested within 24 hours.
Thompson also took exception to a statement Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson made to the newspaper on Tuesday. Wilson told the Times Free Press that Maj. Mike Freeman told Magistrate Jerry Day that Spence set a $10,000 bond in the case, and Day then rescinded it.
Thompson said that, actually, her office rescinded the bond earlier that day, after hearing a complaint from Franklin's office.
On Thursday, Wilson said again that Freeman talked to Day about the issue. And he's sure that Day rescinded the bond. But he's not sure about whether Day had already acted before the sheriff's office talked to him.
"I'm sure it's accurate," Wilson told the Times Free Press, "if that's what [Thompson] said."
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.