Federal trial nearing in prisoners’ assaults
Transport driver accused by 2 women
A California man accused of sexually assaulting two female inmates while transporting them through Arkansas — one in 2014 and the other in 2017 — to out-ofstate jails is facing a March 9 jury trial in a Little Rock federal courtroom.
At a pretrial hearing Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. discussed procedural matters with John Wesley Hall Jr., defense attorney for Eric Scott Kindley, 51, and two attorneys from the Department of Justice in Washington. Kindley sat silently at the defense table.
Federal prosecutors Fara Gold and Maura White said that during the trial that is expected to last about two weeks, they plan to call about 20 witnesses, including some other women who say Kindley assaulted them while transporting them across the country, under contract with various jails, in his unmarked white Dodge Caravan.
During hearings in 2018 and 2019 in Little Rock, an FBI agent from Phoenix testified that Kindley has operated prisoner transport businesses, without regulation, since 2002. Kindley
transported shackled female prisoners across the country by himself and is suspected of sexually assaulting more than 100 of them, the agent said.
A Jan. 28, 2017, assault in Pope County on a woman being transported from Alabama to Arizona led to an investigation that uncovered other attacks on female prisoners by Kindley over several years, the agent testified. One of those other assaults occurred in February of 2014 in the Eastern District of Arkansas, while Kindley transported a woman from Texas to Oklahoma, according to the indictment. It doesn’t say specifically where in the Eastern District the assault is believed to have occurred.
The Little Rock trial will be Kindley’s first, though federal prosecutors said Thursday that he is facing a “parallel case” in federal court in California. Details of that case couldn’t be found online Thursday, indicating it may still be in the early stages. He had previously faced a similar federal case in Arizona but it has been dropped.
Nearly a year ago, the Justice Department filed a notice of intent to offer evidence at Kindley’s Little Rock trial of “seven other acts of sexual assault, as well as evidence of eight crimes, wrongs or other acts.”
A lengthy court document provided some details of the other purported assaults, asserting that they occurred as far back as 2005 or 2006.
However, in November, Marshall issued an order excluding testimony from all but three of the seven women. He said two of the purported incidents weren’t similar enough to the allegations in the Arkansas case to show a propensity for assault on Kindley’s part. The other five cases, he said, each “bears striking similarities to the charged assaults,” while not being unfairly prejudicial or problematic enough by themselves to be excluded.
But, Marshall said, “the issue here is volume.” He noted that “admitting testimony from all five witnesses would compromise Kindley’s due process rights, virtually guaranteeing a conviction based on the alleged prior acts rather than the charged crimes.”
He said prosecutors can present testimony from three of the five, and that they can choose which three to call.
The order also addressed prosecutors’ requests to present evidence from eight more people about Kindley’s previous “bad acts.” Marshall said he would permit testimony from only two of those witnesses.
“The probative value of this evidence is minimal,” he said, adding that the admissible testimony is “sufficient to address issues like opportunity, intent, and plan, and to do so thoroughly.”
He said the rest of the “bad acts” evidence that prosecutors sought to admit “is substantially outweighed by the risk of unfairly prejudicing Kindley, confusing the issues, and needlessly preventing cumulative evidence.”
Kindley was arrested in the Arkansas case on June 1, 2017, a day after he signed up as an Uber driver and his smartphone, which FBI agents were monitoring, showed him conducting searches about Uber drivers having sex with passengers, the agent testified in February 2018.
Kindley was first indicted by a federal grand jury in Arkansas on Sept. 12, 2017. The indictment was superseded in January 2019, to add the allegations about the attacks that it said occurred on Feb. 15 and 16 of 2014.
In the 2017 incident, the agent said a woman who was then 27 years old said Kindley stopped his van on a dark, desolate road in Pope County to let her urinate. The agent said Kindley uncuffed one of the women’s hands but left her legs shackled together and threw her against the side of the van, reaching inside her panties and scratching her so hard that his fingernails tore the fabric.
The agent said Kindley demanded oral sex from the woman but she screamed, causing coyotes and other animals in the area to howl and prompting Kindley to order the woman back inside the van. He eventually took her to the Russellville jail, but she didn’t report him because, the agent said, he told her he was a federal marshal and was friends with the other officers.
In the 2014 incident, Kindley is accused of forcing another female inmate to perform oral sex on him.
He is charged with depriving both women of their civil rights, and with possession of a firearm during a crime of violence during the 2017 incident. The indictment says he showed his gun to the woman as they climbed back into the van, telling her, “It only takes one bullet to the head.”
The Little Rock trial will be Kindley’s first, though federal prosecutors said Thursday that he is facing a “parallel case” in federal court in California.