It's apparently back to square one for an Amador County Superior Court case that has drawn wide attention from inside and outside the county.
On Tuesday, Judge David Richmond ruled that a plea agreement offered by the Amador County District Attorney's Office to a Fiddletown couple accused of animal neglect was contrary to law and therefore unacceptable.
The case involves 45-year-old John O'Sullivan and his wife Krista Clem, who faced charges after a neighbor alerted authorities to a dead colt on O'Sullivan's property in January 2006. That led to five horses being seized by Amador County Animal Control and allegations that O'Sullivan and Clem had starved six horses, including the one that was found dead.
The Grace Foundation, a nonprofit El Dorado Hills organization that takes in mistreated horses and uses them to engage neglected or abused children, took in three of the horses, including one that later gave birth. Three horses that appeared healthy were left in O'Sullivan's care.
At that time, with O'Sullivan's blessing, Animal Control took the dead horse to the University of California, Davis, for a necropsy. In U.C. Davis' preliminary report on the dead horse, veterinarian Brad Barr cited a lack of body fat described as "serous atrophy of fat."
In an effort to refute the charge that the couple had starved the horses, Clem presented documents to the court she received after submitting Barr's findings to a parasitologist for evaluation. The parasitologist letter, which Clem provided to both the court and to the district attorney's office, stated that the dead horse had a disease called "larval cyathostominosis" which, according to the parasitologist, "causes rapid massive weight loss over a very few weeks, and death." That information never came into play since it was submitted to the court after a plea agreement had been made.
The controversial case appeared to have been resolved in March when the plea agreement was negotiated by O'Sullivan's and the district attorney and approved by the court. The agreement allowed O'Sullivan to plead no contest to two misdemeanor charges of animal neglect and in return dropped the felony charges against O'Sullivan and Clem. The agreement would have also returned the horses to the couple; a condition the district attorney's office later contended was contrary to the law and which they said was only discovered after the agreement had already been made.
O'Sullivan and Clem appeared in superior court on April 27 for a sentencing hearing before Richmond, after the district attorney's office asked that the plea agreement with O'Sullivan be set aside. Richmond continued the matter to allot more time for addressing the issues including a defense motion that the district attorney's office recuse itself from prosecuting the case. Both the state Attorney General's Office and the district attorney's office opposed the motion.
On May 8, after a two-day hearing, the court denied the motion filed by Clem and joined by O'Sullivan's attorney Robert Schell, calling for the district attorney's office to be recused, and found that Clem had "failed to meet her burden of proof" to demonstrate that a conflict existed that would make it unlikely that the defendants would receive a fair trial.
Also on Tuesday, in addition to ruling the plea agreement invalid, the DA lost its motion to have the two horses in O'Sullivan and Clem's possession returned to Animal Control. The three horses that have been in the care of the Grace Foundation will apparently also remain until the matter is resolved, since Richmond did not decide otherwise.
O'Sullivan withdrew his earlier pleas to the two misdemeanor charges and the
original felony charges were reinstated, effectively returning the case to its
beginning.
Richmond denied the DA's request to have the charges reinstated against Clem,
saying the charges against her had been dismissed, which now causes
prosecutors to decide whether to re-file criminal charges against her.
The matter returns to court on May 29 for a trial setting hearing.
