Ken McCall: DA forced to walk tough line after three recent deaths

Friday, July 12, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

SOME CONTROVERSIAL cases have passed across District Attorney Stewart Bell's desk in recent weeks.

First, a Metro Police officer shoots and kills his third man in six years.

Then a woman forgets her 3-month-old baby in the back seat of her car and the baby dies.

Finally, a gravel pit feud erupts into a heavy machinery duel and ends with a fatal shooting.

All the cases draw extensive media coverage, but none results in charges from Bell's office, leaving some people unhappy.

The case that's generated the most emotion and unhappiness, Bell says, is the baby's death.

During a busy morning, Samantha Bonham told police, she dropped off two of her children at day care before going to work, but somehow forgot to drop off the sleeping infant in the back seat of her van. It wasn't until after lunch that she discovered her tragic mistake.

The incident shocked and horrified valley residents. A month later, people are still questioning the facts of the case as well as Bell's decision not to prosecute.

"A lot of people think she should have been hung," says one woman familiar with the case and the family. "But she was a very responsible mother.

"She loved her children. And she will probably never be the same."

Bells says calls from the public came in on both sides, but the majority wanted prosecution.

Legally, though, he says it was an easy call to make. Five of his prosecutors reviewed the case and all came to the same conclusion.

The decision hinges on the difference between criminal and civil negligence, which Bell admits is difficult to get across to the public.

To be criminally negligent you have to "knowingly do something that you know -- or should know -- would put someone in danger."

If, for example, you're driving the speed limit, run a stop sign and kill a pedestrian, that's civil negligence. You will not be charged.

But if you were doing 60 in a 15 mph school zone at the time, Bell says, you can expect to be arrested.

You were criminally negligent, he says, because "the whole course of conduct placed somebody in danger."

Another example: a half-dozen children will drown in backyard pools this year.

"They're negligent -- all of them," Bell says, but they're almost never criminal.

If Bonham had knowingly left her baby in the car to go play video poker or run errands, Bell says, she would have been charged with a crime.

But Bell is convinced she didn't know her daughter was in the car all morning.

"We make mistakes as people," he says, "even mistakes that have terrible, tragic consequences. We could, as a society, punish that behavior by prison, but we don't."

* The case involving Metro officer George Pease put the district attorney's office in an unenviable crossfire between the police and members of the black community -- and left both sides unhappy. But Bells says he's confident his office did its best.

Two deputy district attorneys presented the evidence to a coroner's inquest jury, which decided unanimously that Pease was justified in shooting Henry Rowe.

While he could technically have overriden the jury's verdict and pressed charges anyway, Bell says it would have made a "sham" of the coroner's inquest process.

That system was designed -- at the request of the public and the media -- to make sure the decisions to prosecute officer-involved shootings were made openly, rather than by the district attorney's office in private.

"We have to respect the process," Bells says. "Either that or scrap it."

* Perhaps the most difficult case is the gravel pit shooting.

Prosecutors reviewed the results of the homicide investigation this week but concluded they need more evidence.

The problem: The testimony from the two sides, Big Horn Materials Co. and TCB Now, is "dramatically different."

According to one side it's clear-cut murder, Bells says, but according to the other it's clearly self-defense.

So Bell has requested other evidence, such as the autopsy report and police photos, to help them re-create the incident.

"It falls upon us to decide who's telling the truth in order to legally and ethically decide what course to take."

Either way, it's a sure bet somebody will be unhappy.

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