In an unusual move, the Island County Prosecutor’s Office is asking a state appeals court to review a superior court judge’s equally unusual decision to vacate a jury’s verdict in a rape case.
On March 31, a jury in Island County Superior Court found 28-year-old Aston Samms guilty of rape in the third degree and attempted rape in the second degree. The jury declined to find Samms guilty of the more serious charge of rape in the second degree.
On July 3, Island County Superior Court Judge Christon Skinner, a former defense attorney, filed a decision letter stating that the defense attorney at trial did not provide effective assistance and, therefore, deprived Samms of a fair trail.
The alleged rape occurred at the victim’s Oak Harbor apartment on Aug. 27, 2022. Samms had consensual sex with the victim’s roommate. After a series of SnapChat messages, the woman agreed to allow Samms to come into her bedroom and commit a sex act on her, but she allegedly did not consent to sexual intercourse. During this interaction, Samms allegedly raped her or tried to rape her twice as she told him to stop and tried to push him off, according to the prosecution’s brief on the case.
The woman started screaming for her roommate and Samms left, the police report states. The victim called police and went to a hospital for a rape kit exam.
Following the trial, Samms hired a new attorney, Mark Middaugh, who filed a motion for a new trial after studying the trial transcript and investigating decisions made by the original attorney, Connor Jepson. Middaugh argued that Jepson was ineffective at trial for several reasons. Most importantly, he argued that the attorney erred by not objecting when a SANE nurse testified regarding memory and trauma response despite not being listed as an expert by the prosecution.
Middaugh wrote that the court of appeals has made clear that a failure to object to expert evidence can be ineffective assistance of counsel.
“The jury verdict in this case finding Mr. Samms guilty of attempted rape in the second degree — a class A felony subject to indeterminate sentencing — could result in his spending the rest of his life in prison,” Middaugh wrote. “This court should not countenance this result when his trial was tainted by ineffective assistance of counsel and improper argument.”
In response, Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Laura Twitchell argued that the “extraordinary remedy” of granting a new trial is not supported, either factually or legally, in the motion for a new trial. She wrote that the request for a new trial was filed after the deadline for such actions.
Twitchell explained that court rules only allow a judge to grant a new trial in specific circumstances, including when “substantial justice has not been done.” She wrote that a new trial isn’t warranted under this prong because Middaugh could not establish that the other attorney’s actions were deficient or that there was a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different but for the defense attorney’s performance.
In regard to the SANE nurse testimony, she wrote that the questions regarding a trauma response were part of a conversational direct exam and didn’t culminate in an expert opinion.
Skinner, however, disagreed and granted a new trial. While he dismissed many of Middaugh’s arguments, he agreed that the trial counsel’s failure to object to the SANE nurse’s “inadmissible” testimony represented ineffective assistance. He wrote that there was a reasonable probability that the outcome of the trial could have been different if the attorney had objected to the nurse’s opinion about why the alleged victim’s memory was inconsistent.
In addition, Skinner noted that the attorney failed to challenge any of the prosecutor’s questions posed to any of the trial witnesses.
“While this circumstance by itself would not warrant a new trial, the totality of what occurred during defense counsel’s representation of Mr. Samms deprived Mr. Samms of a fair trial,” Skinner wrote.
In response, the prosecutor’s office decided to appeal; prosecutors can only appeal in limited circumstances and this is one of them.
“We disagree with the rationale of the judge’s ruling,” Island County Prosecutor Greg Banks wrote in an email. “There is a procedure to have the decision reviewed by a higher court. We are simply using that process to ask for review.”
