Published: July 01, 2009 04:42 pm      

A bad odor — 07/02/09

raises an outside issue that should be investigated

The six-day trial that resulted in Elliott County Jailer Charles F. Howard being convicted of raping a female prisoner he was transporting to the Boyd County Detention Center on Aug. 31 exposed several troubling issues beyond the crime itself.

Chief among them was an apparent breach of protocol at the Boyd lockup that we believe cries out for further investigation.

Capt. Rex Castle, a deputy jailer and the custodian of records at the Boyd jail, testified that it was standard procedure for two separate log books to be kept showing prisoners’ arrival times at the jail and the names of the officers who transported them.

However, Castle told jurors that in the case of Howard and the woman he was convicted of raping, those records had mysteriously vanished. Under questioning by Boyd Commonwealth’s Attorney David Justice, he said there was no rational explanation for that to have occurred.

We lack both the knowledge and the evidence to state definitively that a cover-up took place here. However, given the fact that the detention center receives hundreds of prisoners every year, it certainly seems suspicious that the log records would be missing in this one particular case.

Ironically, the disappearance of those records may have hurt Howard more than it helped him. Defense attorney Michael Curtis maintained that Howard and the woman actually arrived at the detention center much earlier than 6:44 p.m. — the time shown in her booking report — and that he therefore would not have had time to drive her to a remote area and rape her, since security camera footage showed Howard’s vehicle leaving Appalachian Fuels at 5:57 p.m.

Without the jail logs, though, there was no way that could be verified.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation as to why the records went missing. Still, as prosecutor Justice told jurors in his closing remarks, “It just smells bad.”

We agree. It reeks to high heaven.

Our hope is that the Boyd Fiscal Court and the state Department of Corrections have detected the odor and will take appropriate action.