How a breakdown in communication left inmate in the lurch last year

As the days in the Park County Detention Center turned into weeks and then months, Shay B. Wilson was assured that authorities in Montana were working through the paperwork and would be coming soon to pick him up.

The process of extraditing a defendant like Wilson — who was fighting his return to Montana on allegations of felony theft — can take a long time, then-Deputy Park County Prosecuting Attorney Sam Krone said at a May 2015 hearing.

However, Wilson’s case was taking an unusually long time: 100 days and counting.

“They (the Park County Attorney’s Office) are being told that ... it’s being worked on, apparently from Montana, but we don’t even know what that means,” Wilson’s court-appointed attorney, Travis Smith of Cody, objected at the time. “Is it sitting on a bureaucrat or a lawyer’s desk in Montana, or has it been transferred to Wyoming or … we just don’t know. And here he (Wilson) sits on a $30,000 cash only bond.”

Smith asked Circuit Court Judge Bruce Waters to lower Wilson’s bail and let him get out of jail.

Judge Waters gave Montana and Wyoming authorities one more week.

“If it’s just more of the same, ‘We’re working on it,’ kind of thing, Mr. Smith’s motion has an excellent chance of getting granted,” the judge warned.

Four days later, Krone filed a motion to have the case dismissed.

“The state of Montana has refused to extradite the defendant,” he wrote.

It turned out that authorities in Beaverhead County, Montana, had never even started the process to extradite Wilson — despite apparently telling their counterparts in Park County they had.

Wilson was freed, having served 104 days behind bars “for nothing,” as Smith would later put it.

The Tribune was unable to get in contact with Wilson for his thoughts, but Park County Sheriff Scott Steward and Park County commissioners were irked by the ordeal; they demanded that Beaverhead County cover the costs of housing Wilson in the jail for three and a half months.

Records reviewed and interviews conducted by the Tribune over a period of months couldn’t pinpoint exactly how the process broke down, but some of the confusion stemmed from a kind of flip-flop by Beaverhead County Attorney Jed Fitch.

“I (initially) said, ‘Yes we’ll take him,’ but then when I saw he was going to fight extradition I said, ‘No thanks. Not going to do it,’” Fitch explained in a December interview.

The Beaverhead County prosecutor said the problem was that, until he got a phone call from Park County in mid-May 2015, no one had told him Wilson was fighting his return to Montana.

The crime

Wilson’s troubles with Montana and Wyoming authorities began in late November 2012, when he allegedly walked out of a Dillon, Montana, co-op with a $2,800 saddle.

An employee at Rocky Mountain Supply tried to stop Wilson, but charging documents say he ignored the employee, got into his Chevy Blazer and took off.

Dillon police caught up with the vehicle and eventually forced Wilson and his passenger to pull over. In the Blazer, the officers said they found not only the co-op’s saddle, but blankets, bags and other new merchandise totaling more than $14,000 in value.

Among the items were a $1,500 set of reins and a $100 bosal that had been stolen from Seidel’s Saddlery in Cody a couple weeks earlier; police say the items still had their price tags attached.

Wilson was arrested and charged with felony theft and three misdemeanor driving violations in Beaverhead County. He made bail and went free, but he failed to show up for a pretrial conference in August 2013 and authorities there issued a warrant seeking to re-arrest him.

Park County Prosecuting Attorney Bryan Skoric filed his own felony theft charge against Wilson shortly after that, in connection with the theft from Seidel’s Saddlery.

Wilson ended up being arrested in Salt Lake City about a year later on unrelated allegations. When that Utah case wrapped up, Skoric decided he wanted Wilson brought back to Park County to answer to the felony charge here. Two sheriff’s deputies traveled to Spanish Fork, Utah, and retrieved Wilson on Jan. 17, 2015.

A couple weeks later, Skoric’s office reached a deal with Wilson. On Jan. 30, 2015, prosecutors agreed to lower the theft charge to a misdemeanor in exchange for Wilson’s no contest plea, $390 in fines and fees, six months of unsupervised probation and credit for the time he’d served in jail to that point.

Wilson was also ordered to pay $1,573.59 in restitution to cover the Park County Sheriff’s Office’s costs of bringing him from Utah (including meals, lodging, wages and gas mileage).

A failure to communicate

With Park County’s case closed, the Sheriff’s Office contacted Beaverhead County, Montana, to see if they wanted Wilson next.

Fitch, the Beaverhead County prosecutor, confirmed through the Dillon Police Department that he did.

“I mean, we’ve got a warrant for them,” Fitch recalled saying of Wilson.

Wilson, however, didn’t want to go back to Montana.

On Feb. 2, 2015, Park County Detention Center administrator Tod Larson contacted someone in Beaverhead County — his notes don’t say which agency — and told them Wilson had decided to force Montana to extradite him.

Fitch says the news that Wilson was fighting extradition never made it to him — and he said that knowledge would have changed his mind.

“There’s a difference between wanting a guy and filing extradition papers,” he said.

When a defendant refuses to be brought back to a state, that state has to issue a governor’s warrant requesting the person’s extradition. It’s a time-consuming process that requires coordination between authorities in both states.

Fitch said he didn’t want that hassle and cost.

“If someone fights extradition, that has to be communicated and that’s what I didn’t know; that’s what I wasn’t told,” he said.

Fitch said that, if he had been in Park County’s shoes, “I wouldn’t have held (Wilson) that long without having more information.

“But maybe they were being told, ‘yes, we’re doing the extradition,’” he added. “I don’t know who they talked to, but it wasn’t me.”

Larson’s notes say it was someone in Fitch’s office. The notes say Larson called the Beaverhead County Attorney’s Office for an update on Feb. 23, 2015, and was told “that they are working on a governor’s warrant.”

‘90 days is pushing things out there’

Wilson, meanwhile, continued to sit in the detention center.

In March 2015, Park County Circuit Court staff sent Wilson a form letter notifying him that — because he hadn’t made any payments on his fines and restitution for the Cody theft — he could be re-arrested and ordered to pay his fine with jail time (getting $15 in credit per day).

“I’m unable to pay fine because I’m still incarcerated,” Wilson wrote back from jail. “Do I get $15 a day for the time I’ve been here?”

Judge Waters gave him the credit, wiping out the $390 in penalties.

The judge also held periodic hearings on Wilson’s status, with Park County officials continuing to relay their belief that Montana officials were working on getting a governor’s warrant.

Things came to a head at the May 11, 2015, hearing.

Notes from detention center staff say they checked with someone in Beaverhead County that day and were told a governor’s warrant was still being pursued; Krone, the then-prosecutor, gave a similar report in Circuit Court.

But Smith — Wilson’s defense attorney — was dissatisfied.

“‘Working on it’ means more than just keeping Mr. Wilson on ice until somebody gets around to doing it,” Smith argued in court. “I don’t think that’s fair to Mr. Wilson at all.”

Judge Waters offered that “it’s not unusual for these things to take 60 days, but to take 90 days is pushing things out there quite a while.”

Krone pledged to talk directly to the attorney who was handling the process, and he got in touch with Fitch a few days later.

Fitch says that’s the first time he’d heard that Wilson was still in custody and fighting extradition.

“I said, ‘That (time in jail) seems like about long enough. I’m not going to do anything. You should let him go,’” Fitch recalled.

Wilson was released on May 15, 2015.

Beaverhead County pays up

The change in plans did not sit well with Sheriff Steward.

Steward’s office generally holds inmates for other agencies at no charge, in the same way other agencies hold Park County’s fugitives for them. However, when Beaverhead County decided not to pick up Wilson, Steward sent them a $6,240 bill — the same $60 per day he would charge for holding prisoners for the state of Wyoming.

After some negotiations between the two counties’ commissions, Beaverhead County agreed to pay $1,200 late last year.

While Fitch believes Park County should have done more to verify whether Beaverhead County wanted to extradite Wilson, “there’s no question that, in my opinion, the mistakes were more on our end,” he said.

(Fitch believes part of the problem in Beaverhead County was a breakdown in communication with Beaverhead County Sheriff Frank Klusner; Klusner said his agency “really had no part in the matter.”)

As for the 59-year-old Wilson, he remains not much better off than when the process started. He continues to have active warrants for his arrest in both Park and Beaverhead counties.

Ironically, Park County authorities are seeking to have Wilson arrested because he’s failed to reimburse the Sheriff’s Office the $1,573.59 it cost to bring him to Cody from Utah last year. This time, however, the warrant specifies that Park County is only interested in Wilson if he’s found in Wyoming.

Fitch, meanwhile, said he’s kept Beaverhead County’s warrant active to discourage Wilson from returning from Montana.

As long as Wilson stays out of Big Sky Country, he would appear to be in the clear on the theft from the Dillon co-op.

“It seems to me if Montana all of a sudden tried to extradite him now, they’d have some explaining to do,” offered Smith, the defense attorney.