A former sheriff charged with murder in the 2024 shooting death of a judge has lost a bid to get his indictments by a grand jury dismissed, but the judge in the case is permitting a bond hearing.
Judge Christopher Cohron of the Letcher County Circuit Court also denied former Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Mickey Stines’s request to unseal a mental health evaluation for use in the bond hearing. Stines is accused of first-degree murder and murder of a public official in the shooting death of District Judge Kevin Mullins in September 2024.
Lawyers for Stines argued that prosecutors committed two violations that should result in the dismissal of the November 2024 Letcher County Grand Jury indictment against Stines. First, they claimed a prosecutor “elicited false and misleading testimony” that influenced grand jurors to return the murder indictment. Second, they argued that a previous grand jury meeting in October related to subpoenas for medical records and jail records should have been recorded, but wasn’t.
Defense attorneys claim a detective who testified at the November hearing was misleading grand jurors when they asked him about Stines’s state of mind (Stines is utilizing an insanity defense). A grand juror asked whether Stines was of sound mind the day of the shooting, and Detective Stamper said that he was.
The defense wrote that prosecutors didn’t reveal information about a doctor diagnosing “an ‘acute stress reaction’” the day before the shooting, or information about mental health and psychiatric issues in its aftermath, “including observations of ‘active psychosis.’”
Even if mental health matters were “intentionally or recklessly omitted,” the judge wrote, the video jurors saw of Stines shooting Mullins multiple times gave grand jurors sufficient probable cause to indict him. “(T)he alleged omissions and misrepresentation, alone or together, cannot be viewed as making a difference in the grand jury decision to indict the defendant,” Cohron wrote.
Judge Cohron concluded that the detective’s testimony and the prosecutors’ actions probably didn’t rise to the level of prejudicing Stines — and that even if they had, that might not matter at the level of an indictment, which just involves finding probable cause, as much as it would at an actual trial.
“Probable cause is not a high bar,” Cohron wrote before adding that grand jurors saw plenty of evidence to give them probable cause to indict.
“(T)he prosecutor played the video footage showing the defendant shooting Judge Mullins multiple times,” Cohron wrote. “That evidence alone removed the question of who shot and killed Judge Mullins. The video footage clearly serves as a reasonable ground for belief the defendant intended to cause the death when he shot and killed Judge Mullins.”
Cohron also rejected a second reason for dismissal – a claim that prosecutors violated a court rule of procedure by not recording a meeting with grand jurors in which they asked the grand jury to subpoena medical records and jail records.
Defense attorneys labeled that meeting “testimony” and said it should have been recorded. Prosecutors argued that the meeting was limited in scope and didn’t include testimony. The event not being recorded did not prejudice Stines, Cohron ruled.
Cohron ruled in Stines’s favor on a motion to grant a bond hearing.
But on the related question of unsealing mental health records — which the defense could use to try and suggest that Stines’s actions weren’t premeditated and could result in a lesser charge than first-degree murder — Cohron rejected Stines’s request.
Stines’s lawyers wanted to unseal a mental health evaluation and introduce parts of it “to support his defense and ensure the Court has a full and fair understanding of the relevant facts.”
Cohron wrote that “a bail hearing is not a trial rehearsal.”
That bail hearing, he ruled, must be held on whether the facts prosecutors cite as evidence “warrant the conclusion that the proof of guilt is evident or the presumption of guilt is great” for first-degree murder, which allows a defendant to be held without bail.
“Any proof which may exist and be used to contradict the Commonwealth’s facts naturally exists apart from the sealed (mental health) evaluation.”
