He’s Back

We got word last night that he was being moved.

This morning we can confirm it: John Charles Smallbone is back in Converse County.

He is in custody in the same detention center he walked out of on June 24, when someone carried in $250,000 in cash and paid his bond in full.

On August 6, in Department 29 of San Francisco Superior Court, his attorney asked for a delay, citing a 30-day window to respond. The judge approved it. The next hearing was set for September 3.

That date is still two weeks out. He is in Douglas today.

I don’t know how that happened, and I’m not going to fill the gap with a guess. There are ordinary explanations available — a defendant can waive extradition at any point and shorten the process considerably, and a demanding state can produce its paperwork faster than a court’s calendar anticipated. I don’t know which, if either, applies here.

It’s a question with a documented answer somewhere, and I intend to find it rather than speculate. When I have it, I’ll print it.

I’ve seen people say the money is gone. I said something close to that myself last week, and I want to walk it back, because it’s further along than the record supports.

Here’s what Wyoming actually says.

Under Wyoming Rule of Criminal Procedure 46, if there is a breach of a condition of a bond, the court shall declare a forfeiture of the bail. That word is mandatory, not discretionary. Failing to appear is a breach.

But that isn’t the end of it. The same rule provides that a forfeiture can be set aside. And where a forfeiture has not been set aside, the court enters a judgment of default on motion — after which the court may remit that judgment in whole or in part.

In plain terms: forfeiture is declared, then there is a process, and a judge has real discretion in it. Whoever posted that money can ask for relief. Judge Peasley decides.

There is precedent worth knowing. The Wyoming Supreme Court has upheld a district court that refused to give a defendant his forfeited bond money back — in a case where the defendant hadn’t appeared because he was incarcerated in South Dakota. Being in custody in another state did not get that money returned. That’s one case, not a rule, and every one of these turns on its own facts and its own judge. But it’s a real data point about how Wyoming courts have treated this.

And here is the part most people don’t know. Wyoming statute directs that proceeds recovered from a bail forfeiture in a criminal case be paid into the county treasury, to the credit of the public school fund of the county where the defendant was admitted to bail.

That’s Converse County.

Now I’ll tell you plainly that the next paragraph is my opinion and not the law.

I think that money should be forfeited in full, and I think there is something close to poetry in where the statute sends it. A quarter of a million dollars, put up to free a man facing charges involving children, going instead to the schools those children attend. I’ve also seen people argue it should first repay the county for what it cost to chase him across two states — I understand the appeal, but that isn’t what the statute says, and any recovery of extradition costs would have to come through some other mechanism entirely.

None of that is up to me. It is up to a judge, and a motion, and a record.

A district judge who has already ruled on him twice. Judge Scott Peasley refused to consider the improper handwritten letter Smallbone sent asking for his bond to be reduced, and on July 28 took the bench to an empty defendant’s chair. My source in that courtroom described him leaving the bench visibly annoyed. That’s an observation of demeanor from one person in the gallery, not a statement of how he’ll rule on anything.

A rebuilt case. Prosecutor Nathan Shumway told the court the state intends to drop the original charges and has already refiled new ones, to be entered when Smallbone appears. Nobody outside that office has seen what’s in that filing, including me. I’m not going to characterize charges I haven’t read.

An unsettled defense. His public defender, Denny Harts, asked to be taken off the case and gave no reasons on the record. Separately, the public defender’s office moved to revisit whether Smallbone qualified for appointed counsel at all — after a man who swore he had no ability to borrow money for a lawyer produced $250,000 in cash and was found not to have disclosed a business and two boats. As far as I know, neither question has been resolved.

And 72 felony counts in their original form, which he has never answered — not on July 28, not in Colorado, not in California.

For a month this story has been watched through screens. A Larimer County feed that Kelsey Crandall helped me log into. A San Francisco courtroom with no remote access at all, where a volunteer had to physically walk into 850 Bryant Street so any of us would know what happened in it.

If the proceedings from here forward are in Converse County District Court, they’ll be in a room that people in this county can walk into.

I’d encourage people to do that when a date is set. Not to disrupt anything — to sit there. An open courtroom with people in the gallery is how this is supposed to work.

I’ll publish the date as soon as I have it.

To the woman in the Bay Area who sat in Department 29 on August 6 and reported back — thank you. You don’t need to go on September 3.

To Kelsey, and to everyone who watched a screen, drove past a house, sat in a courtroom, or sent me something they weren’t sure mattered — this is what that adds up to.

He failed to appear twice. This morning he’s in a cell in Douglas.

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Smallbone is presumed innocent of all charges. Custody status can be verified through the Converse County Sheriff’s Office. Statements about Wyoming bail forfeiture procedure reflect W.R.Cr.P. 46 and Wyoming statute as I read them; I am not an attorney and any application to this case is for the court to decide. Corrections will be published at the top of this piece.