Hearing is granted on innocence claim

Family members of a Batesville man who has been in prison for 37 years for a murder they contend was actually a natural death were thrilled Friday after an appeals court gave him a chance to present his claim of innocence before a federal judge.

“We were always told our case was impossible for so many reasons, and we are truly thankful that the justice system we thought was broken can actually give us a chance to finally be heard,” the man’s sister, Cynthia Houlroyd, said in an email.

Houlroyd’s brother, Keith Allen Deaton, 55, is serving a life sentence in an Arkansas prison after he pleaded guilty in 1977 to burglary and murder in the death of Linda Joan Reed, a 26-year-old mother of four.

In March 2012, Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller heard two days of testimony on Deaton’s request for a second chance to present evidence, which he said surfaced years after his conviction, that indicated it wasn’t a hammer blow on the head that killed Reed, as was

originally believed. Deaton admitted burglarizing Reed’s house and hitting her with a hammer. He said that’s why he pleaded guilty to both burglary and murder after she died several weeks later.

After the burglary, Reed was treated for a skull fracture at a hospital, but Deaton’s family now believes she died from an infection that wasn’t detected during her first hospital stay or an overdose of medication after she was readmitted. They say the pathologist who performed her autopsy didn’t have access to her hospital records, which would have shown she had a severe urinary tract infection and had pneumonia in both lungs, and listed her cause of death as “respiratory arrest due to or as a consequence of the unknown — possible Valium overdose.”

Even though the pathologist didn’t declare Reed’s death a homicide, prosecutors decided there was no other explanation, since complications from the head wound could have constituted “the unknown,” and charged Deaton with capital murder. Deaton’s family says his attorney at the time, who is now deceased, was inexperienced in criminal law and didn’t challenge the conclusion. Instead, they say, the attorney advised Deaton to negotiate a guilty plea in return for a life sentence, to avoid a possible death sentence.

Nineteen years passed before Houlroyd, who had been learning how to read medical records, persuaded the pathologist, Dr. Rodney Carlton, to re-examine Reed’s cause of death in light of the medical records that had become available. When he did, he decided the death couldn’t have been caused by the head injury, and wrote letters to two governors to help Deaton’s family. But because so much time had elapsed, subsequent attorneys who realized the deadline for claiming ineffective counsel had passed decided instead to focus on clemency, but their requests were rejected.

Then in June 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the statute of limitations for an ineffective counsel claim could be tolled — basically, stopping the clock on the statute of limitations — if the attorney’s actions created an “extraordinary circumstance.”

Miller allowed Deaton, now represented by Little Rock lawyer Dana Reece, to present evidence that the statute of limitations should have been tolled in his case, allowing him to present medical evidence in support of a new trial. But on Dec. 18, 2012, Miller denied Deaton’s request to retroactively toll the statute on his 2008 petition to present new evidence.

The petition had initially been denied as untimely on June 7, 2010, just before the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Holland v. Florida case that permitted the retroactive freezing of the statute in some cases.

An appeal of Miller’s ruling led to an opinion released Friday by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. The one-paragraph opinion said the issue of whether Miller properly decided the tolling issue is now moot because of a 2013 Supreme Court opinion regarding petitions based primarily on a claim of actual innocence.

The Supreme Court said in the 2013 ruling that delays in seeking relief shouldn’t be held as “an absolute barrier to relief, but as a factor in determining whether actual innocence has been reliably shown.”