(CN) An Arkansas man will be tried a fourth time for murder after the state’s high court on Thursday overturned his latest conviction because of the prosecutor’s campaign activities during trial, which it found to be an “abuse and exploitation of the judicial system.”
“This kind of conduct has no place in the administration of justice and should not have been permitted,” Justice Shawn Womack wrote in the ruling. “The circuit court should have dealt promptly with the prosecutor’s improper campaigning in the courthouse during trial.”
(Courthouse News photo/Kelsey Jukam)
A state jury sentenced Marvin Stanton to life in prison last year for the 2015 murder of Jesse Hamilton following an altercation over a gas station parking spot. Prosecutors claimed Stanton, riding a motorcycle, initiated a verbal and physical altercation with Hamilton, which they say ended when Stanton pulled a handgun from his waistband and shot the 22-year-old victim to death.
State supreme court calls prosecutor’s courthouse campaigning an ‘exploitation of the judicial system’
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The Arkansas Supreme Court overturned a man s murder conviction Thursday after finding that the prosecutor improperly campaigned in the courthouse during the trial.
In the Dec. 17 ruling, Associate Justice Shawn Womack wrote that conduct by Stephanie Potter Barrett, the Miller County prosecuting attorney who won an open seat in March on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, “has no place in the administration of justice and should not have been permitted.”
The trial was the third for Marvin Stanton, an Arkansas man who was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing another man following a fight over a parking spot at a gas station in 2015. The first conviction was reversed on direct appeal because of improper admission of character evidence. A mistrial was then declared in his second trial.