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| For 15 Years, Louisville Murder Defendant Jailed With No Trial in Sight |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 04/18/2003 |
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Unlike the short-timers in the jail who stay in large barracks-like rooms, Sherman Noble has been given a cell of his own. Since being charged in the 1980s with murdering four men, three of them bludgeoned with bricks, Noble has yet to stand trial. For more than 15 years, he has waited while a revolving cast of judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys have debated his mental competency. As time drags by, the 51-year-old Noble says witnesses are dying, memories are fading including his own and his chance for justice is slipping away. ''There's one battle I know for sure I'm losing that's the battle with Father Time,'' he says during an interview at the Jefferson County Jail. ''I can't get a fair trial at this point.'' Now, it is Noble who is slowing the process. A request to dismiss all charges on speedy trial grounds is making its rounds through the higher courts, temporarily suspending the possibility of a criminal trial. It isn't uncommon for competency issues to delay a trial. But Noble's delay has been unusually long, especially since the average wait for a Kentucky criminal defendant to get a trial is less than 10 months. ''This one seems almost off the curve to me,'' says Ron Honberg, spokesman for the National Alliance for The Mentally Ill. Last year in Florida, Robert George Neal was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading no contest to child molestation. But Neal was released just three days after sentencing because he had spent 12 years in jail while his trial was delayed by competency issues. University of Louisville law professor Tim Hall said that if a judge rules a defendant is a threat to himself or others, he is sent to a psychiatric facility for treatment and re-evaluations. Noble, who spent time in mental hospitals before his arrest, is accused of robbing Walker Ison, Charles Thompson and Lorenzo Harris, and then bludgeoning them to death with bricks during a five-day period in March 1987. Noble knew all three men and had been invited into their homes prior to their slayings, police say. Five months after Noble was charged with those murders, a grand jury also indicted him in the 1985 shooting death of Michael Edward Cox. Prosecutors say Noble shot Cox after a ''long-running feud.'' Noble acknowledges that he confessed to the killings, but says he was beaten by police. Noble's attorney, Ramon McGee, said he can understand why his client's competency has been evaluated. But he says the process spiraled out of control. McGee says after the first evaluation in 1989, Noble should have been admitted to the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center and re-evaluated in a year. Instead, he was shuttled between mental hospitals and jail and not evaluated again until 1991. In Noble's 1995 evaluation, the third time he was been found incompetent, Dr. J. Robert Noonan wrote that Noble's ''psychopathology appears to be limited to his perception of the judicial system and the roles of his attorneys in it.'' In 1997, Noble was finally found competent to participate in his own defense. But lawyers and judges weren't convinced, and Noble, who says he participated in the evaluations only to get to the trial he was sure would exonerate him, stopped cooperating. Noble remained in Central State Hospital through 1999 on the order of Judge Stephen Ryan, who inherited the case after another judge retired. A year later, Noble's attorneys quit and he refused further evaluations. Kentucky's Court of Appeals has already rejected Noble's speedy trial petition, but Polombi said the state Supreme Court and perhaps even federal courts remain an option. |
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