Halfway through the first day of witnesses in a trial of a man accused of sexual assault in the Cotton District, the defense attorney made a motion to withdraw from the case because of multiple threats her client had made against her.
Starkville attorney Stephanie Mallette, who represents West Point resident Terry Hill, made the motion in Oktibbeha County Circuit Court when the jury was out of the room.
“I’m afraid of him and scared of him and I have no longer any desire to (represent) him,” she said of Hill.
She added if she continued to represent him, during the trial she would keep “one eye on him and one eye on the proceedings” and asked if the court did order her to continue that there be a policeman between her and Hill — a seating arrangement which, she argued, would prejudice the jury against her client.
Mallette made the motion a couple of hours after Hill interrupted the court, shouting and making threats. According to Judge Lee Coleman, it took several bailiffs to attempt to get Hill out of the courtroom and into a jail cell.
As bailiffs attempted to subdue him, Hill shouted he was innocent and he “didn’t rape nobody” in a loud enough voice to carry to the jury room, Mallette said. She added his behavior had factored into her desire to withdraw from the case.
“I do not want to be alone in a room with this man ever again,” she said.
But District Attorney Scott Colom argued Hill’s behavior was an attempt to get rid of Mallette as his lawyer and continue the case and that “we can’t reward bad behavior.”
Coleman ordered the case to continue with a law enforcement officer dressed in everyday clothes and without his badge or gun sitting between Mallette and Hill.
Hill and another suspect, Jerry Talley, Jr. of McCool, were both arrested in May 2016 after witnesses alleged they entered a college student’s home where they beat one student and raped another. Both Hill and Talley have had lawyers make a motion to withdraw from the case. Talley’s case, which was initially scheduled to go to trial this week, was continued after Talley’s attorney, Benjamin Lang of Starkville, filed a motion with the circuit court July 25 citing “a conflict has arisen between defendant’s attorney and defendant which restricts attorney’s ability to effectively represent” Talley. Columbus-based attorney Donna Smith as been appointed as Tally’s attorney.
Both men are charged with robbery, kidnapping and aggravated assault.
The trial
Though the jury missed Mallette’s motion, they sat through the testimony of multiple eye witnesses, including the sexual assault victim.
The victim, a Jackson resident who in May 2016 was a junior at Mississippi State University, sat on the stand for several minutes, arms stiff at her side as she told how Hill and Talley introduced themselves to her and a friend on her porch at a house in the Cotton District on April 30. She told the jury how it was common for people in the neighborhood, primarily college students, to stop and chat with her and her friends as they walked by the house and the porch. She told the jury the two men came in and had beers and a cigarette with her and some friends. She said that after a about an hour, her friends ushered Hill and Talley out of her house before heading home themselves, leaving only her and her boyfriend, Blake Hugey, at the house. They locked the door and went back into her bedroom when they heard a knock.
The two men were back, she told the jury. They said they had left a cell phone behind, so the victim and Hugey let them back into the home to help look for the phone. That’s when Hill attacked Hugey, and Talley grabbed the victim from behind and dragged her into her roommate’s room, closed the door and turned off the lights.
“I begged him, ‘Please don’t, please, you don’t have to do this’,” the victim testified, tears running down her cheeks. “He got more aggressive in his voice and he said, ‘Do you want to die?'”
She said Talley raped her several minutes before Hill came back into the room dragging Hugey with him and forcing him into a closet. After Talley was done, she said, Hill raped her.
When Assistant District Attorney Trina Davidson-Brooks asked her if she could identify one of the suspects who assaulted her, she looked straight at Hill and pointed.
“Him,” she said. “Right there.”
Hill kept his eyes down and did not look at her.
Mallette’s questions to the victim had to do with the alcohol and drugs the victim had taken before the assault — in addition to several drinks over about 12 hours, the victim had taken Xanax and, a few minutes before the assault, snorted a line of cocaine with Hugey. The victim admitted to being “fairly intoxicated.” But she was conscious enough to know she was being raped, she said.
The jury also heard from Hugey, who said that he was able to call 911 from inside the closet where Hill had forced him because Hill dropped several cell phones he had taken from the victims and Hugey was able to kick it into the closet. When Starkville police officers arrived, both Hill and Talley were on the scene. Hill fled the officers on foot, but Hugey’s phone had a navigation application police were able to use to track Hill to a home on the other side of MSU’s campus.
Other witnesses included the victim’s friend Daniel Smith, who placed Hill and Talley at the victim’s home that night, the 911 operator who answered Hugey’s call from the closet and multiple police officers who assisted in the foot chase to capture Hill.
Hill’s trial is slated to continue today.
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