By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
The latest pretrial conference for the two Glasgow women accused of intentionally killing Michael “Mickey” O. Logsdon on July 9, 2022 focused heavily on procedural matters, motions related to evidence and its interpretation, and a possible bond change.
None of those matters were decided at Friday’s proceeding, but two future hearings were scheduled for further discussion of two of them.
Cheryl Leighanne Bennett and her mother, Donna Cheryl Logsdon, are each facing a charge of murder in relation to the death of their father and husband, respectively. They are alleged to have unplugged or turned off the BiPap – bilevel positive airway pressure – machine upon which Mickey Logsdon had relied for breathing – multiple times during the night and ultimately leaving it unplugged or powered off, causing Mickey Logsdon’s death.
Blake Chambers, who is serving as the special prosecutor in the case, said he had filed a motion to obtain data from certain phones. The data received through an earlier subpoena did not include location information that both he and the defense attorneys – John Olash for Bennett and Rob Eggert for her mother – would like to to have, but the defense wished to have the information for a broader range of time, with more dates included, so a new proposed order would be submitted for the judge’s signature soon.
Olash said the defendants had already told emergency responders that night that they were the only two people in the home that night with Mickey Logsdon, so he wasn’t sure that information was really in dispute. He added, though, that Bennett’s phone had been confiscated when she was first arrested Nov. 3, 2022, and the data had been extracted from it a week later.
He said the report they received indicates that, “on a number of days, prior to the extraction, someone accessed that phone, her phone, and changed data inside that phone. And I’m interested, the defense is interested, in where that was done.”
The location data “might show” that it was accessed near the Bowling Green home of Bennett’s sister, Terri Jo Harris, Olash said in an obvious – and not first – attempt to cast suspicion her way.
Harris, who was observing the proceeding from the courtroom gallery, laughed, barely audibly, at the suggestion.
Chambers recapped to the judge that, at the last pretrial conference, they had discussed the best way to retrieve data from the memory card that had been inserted in the BiPap machine, and he believed they had found a person who could be an expert in doing that, a doctor in Owensboro, and the defense has agreed for him to do that.
Chambers said the defense had filed a motion to dismiss the case, but he hadn’t seen it yet, but he had seen a preliminary report from an expert Olash had procured that alleged information may have been misrepresented to the grand jury that handed down the indictments for Bennett and Logsdon. The prosecutor said that, first of all, if two experts have differing opinions on what the data means, he believed that should be an issue to be resolved at trial. But at the very least, to be able to argue against the motion, the prosecutor said, a report from the new expert would be needed.
Olash said he had filed that motion in anticipation of receiving a report from his own expert, and he had received that just last night and had given Chambers a copy Friday morning, and a copy to the court would be forthcoming.
“It really knocks the case out of the water,” Bennett’s attorney said.
Chambers expressed concern about the potential for having the case tried through pleadings in the public record that news-media representatives could then report.
“I think this case should be tried in a court setting,” he said, adding later that having some kinds of information out there could make it difficult to seat an impartial jury, depending upon how much attention the case gets.
Circuit Judge John T. Alexander said he is generally not inclined to seal case files and that he would let Olash decide whether he wanted to file that report as part of the public record.
“If it’s something that’s not scurrilous and not defamatory and it’s something that is a legitimate record, I’m not going to tell you not to file it …,” Alexander said.
Chambers said he just didn’t want to be in a position where he then would need to file his expert opinion to rebut the other one. Alexander said the opinions on both sides would come out at a hearing anyway.
That hearing was set for 9 a.m. Aug. 14, to allow time for the expert to extract the data from the BiPap memory card and get a report done and such.
The judge reminded them that at this hearing, they would not be focusing on “weight-of-evidence questions.” He stated his understanding of the primary allegation of Olash’s motion to dismiss, and Olash stated it a different way: “My allegations are if the grand jury were sufficiently informed of the realities of the investigation, they would not have indicted.”
Bond
Chambers had also filed a motion to revoke Bennett’s bond. It has been changed and/or revoked multiple times previously due to results of the random drug testing required of her, and he stated Friday that she had two tests that came back positive for drug use.
Olash requested to postpone the hearing so he could have expert testimony that those may have been false positives, based on the possibility that a prescription drug she takes may metabolize into a form that would result in a positive test.
Chambers said he wouldn’t want to wait until the August hearing to address that because this wasn’t the first time she’d violated her bond conditions by using drugs. He also noted that if she were using a prescription that caused false positives, she would be testing positive every week.
A hearing to address the bond issue was set for 9 a.m. June 28.
Trial date
Though there was some discussion of setting a trial date, it was ultimately decided it would be best to wait until after the hearing regarding whether to dismiss the case to do that.
RELATED CONTENT: Attorneys in Bennett-Logsdon case focus on getting technologically based evidence
Comments