Lawyer: Lifestyle evidence not fair

Gillean appeals theft conviction

The jurors who convicted a former university administrator of theft were influenced by the administrator’s homosexuality and not the criminal evidence used against him, the convict’s attorney argued Wednesday.

Arguing before the Arkansas Court of Appeals on Wednesday on behalf of former University of Central Arkansas Chief of Staff Jack Gillean, attorney Tim Dudley said Gillean became the victim of “character assassination” once the trial court improperly allowed the jury to hear testimony about Gillean’s interest in younger men and his partying with UCA students.

Gillean was convicted of six counts of burglary and sentenced to three years in prison.

“There have been a few cases in my life when I knew going into the courtroom I was going to lose the case. This is one of them,” Dudley said. “Not because of the evidence of guilt, but because the trial court ruled pretrial that the state could prove that [Gillean] was a homosexual … that he partied and drank alcohol. That evidence, I think, was totally irrelevant.”

Valerie Fortner of the Arkansas attorney general’s office argued that Faulkner County Circuit Judge Charles Clawson Jr. rightfully allowed evidence illustrating Gillean’s lifestyle.

She argued the evidence Dudley objected to was necessary to demonstrate how intimate, and at times inappropriate, Gillean could be with students.

Ryan Scott was in his mid20s when he met Gillean

through a Craigslist ad on the Internet and began a live-in romantic relationship with him.

At trial, Scott was one of several witnesses who testified that Gillean knowingly supplied keys to campus facilities to UCA student Cameron Stark so Stark could obtain copies of tests from different campus facilities.

Testimony about Scott’s intimate relationship with Gillean helped establish Scott’s credibility, Fortner said.

“I’d argue it’s disingenuous to suggest that private information is shared between people only in the bedroom,” she said. “[Scott] was in a relationship with [Gillean] and was privy, because of that relationship, to more conversations than simply somebody who was a roommate.”

Officers arrested Cameron Stark in May 2012 for an unrelated theft on campus. When police questioned Stark, he confessed to possessing campus keys, saying Gillean had given them to him.

Gillean, a former deputy attorney general and one-time aide to Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, was charged with commercial burglary in October 2012 and went on trial in March 2014.

Stark, who was granted immunity by prosecutor Cody Hiland, testified that Gillean had gone with him to a campus office in February 2011 and stood guard while Stark printed off a test from a professor’s computer.

Prosecutors used text messages and testimony from several witnesses that showed that Gillean often drank with UCA students, discussed marijuana use and hosted parties for them.

Dudley argued that he lost the case because the average juror likely was to have a bias against gays.

“There is not a single text message between Stark and [Gillean] talking about keys. Not one. There were all kinds of inconsistencies in these witnesses’ testimony,” Dudley said. “This was a close case without the homosexuality and the drinking and the partying that made it not a close case. We’d have had a good shot at winning this case if we hadn’t dealt with those issues.”

Fortner said it was important for a jury to have a window into Gillean’s unusual relationships with students.

“The state … had the difficult situation of a very highly educated man, an older man in his 50s with an excellent employment background and having to show that the key was not stolen from him, this was not just an anomaly but that he was an active participant,” Fortner said. “Hosting parties … playing video games with [students], running around campus on snow days … wasn’t to show that he was drunk or a bad person. It was relevant to show a series of behaviors that created a frat party mentality at his house and why someone of his intelligence or stature would choose to allow a student to have a key.”

Dudley also argued Stark’s alleged thefts, and Gillean’s alleged involvement, are not punishable by state statute.

The attorney argued Stark did not steal the tests. Instead, he merely printed copies and left the originals.

“The state didn’t prove its case,” Dudley argued. “To prove that [Stark] stole the exams, the state would be required to prove that he took the exam, that he deprived the professor of the exams permanently. I would ask the state to point to any evidence in this record that he stole the exams and deprived the professor permanently [of the exams].”

Fortner said that state theft statutes cover an item of value and argued that a copy, or even a photograph, of a test was something of value.

“All the professors testified that the tests were invaluable,” Fortner said.