Georgia Supreme Court upholds conviction in Columbus man’s murder outside strip club
A man convicted of murder 11 years after a fatal shooting outside a Columbus strip club was not wronged by the delay in bringing his case to trial, so his life sentence stands, the Georgia Supreme Court has ruled.
A Muscogee County jury in 2017 found Dundell Cash guilty of murder in the Nov. 10, 2006, shooting of 25-year-old Euan Dougal outside what was then the Platinum Club at 2525 Manchester Expressway, where Dougal’s girlfriend was a dancer.
But the case took years to get to trial, partly because Cash was not arrested until 2008, and a key witness disappeared before Cash could be indicted for murder.
Police had identified Cash as a suspect immediately after the shooting, because club employees knew him by name, and witnesses saw him standing next to Dougal right before they heard gunshots around 3 a.m., as the club was closing.
One of those witnesses, Dennis Archer, told police he saw Cash shoot Dougal.
But police lost contact with Archer before Cash was arrested in South Carolina on Nov. 2, 2008, and authorities came to believe that Archer, a homeless man hired to clean up the club’s parking lot, had died.
Without Archer to confirm what he had told investigators he saw, a grand jury on April 21, 2009, refused to indict Cash for the homicide, and he was released from jail.
He remained free for six years, as authorities continued searching for Archer, annually checking online records to see if he turned up. In 2015, he did, having found a job and a fixed address where he was getting mail.
A grand jury on March 10, 2015, indicted Cash for murder, aggravated assault, using a gun to commit a crime and being a convicted felon with a firearm, and he was arrested again two days later.
Cash had previous felony convictions on drug and weapons charges dating back to the late 1990s.
By 2015, the statute of limitations had run out on all but Cash’s murder charges, and the rest were dismissed on April 7, 2016. Cash finally went to trial on Jan. 24, 2017, and Judge Gil McBride sentenced him to life in prison the following Feb. 17.
When Cash appealed for a new trial, McBride denied the motion this past April 16, and Cash appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Arguments
In his appeal argued before the justices on Nov. 5, Cash’s attorneys claimed the delay in his prosecution violated his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial and unfairly hampered his defense, as a witness who could have testified on his behalf had died before the case went to trial.
The value of that defense witness, a man Cash identified as Calvin Jones, was questionable, the court found. Cash claimed Jones, who died in 2010, picked him up that night and saw that Cash was wearing a black jacket and blue jeans. Some witnesses said the man they saw at the club was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt or jacket.
But others had described Cash’s jacket as black, so Jones’ testimony likely would not have altered the verdict, the court found. Also the only evidence of what Cash claimed Jones would have said was an affidavit from Cash, as Jones had made no statement to police at the time.
In weighing the effect of the delay on Cash’s ability to mount an effective defense, the court found it did not warrant overturning his conviction.
It did not calculate the delay as the time between Cash’s 2008 arrest and the 2017 trial. It split the delay into two parts, counting the time Cash actually was in custody: From when he first was arrested in 2008 to when he was released after the grand jury refused to indict him in 2009, and then from his indictment in 2015 until he was tried two years later.
The intervening years when Cash was free did not count, the court said, so the total was calculated at 28 months — six months from his arrest to his release, and 22 months from his indictment to his trial.
Besides his claim about Calvin Jones, Cash argued the testimony of two other missing witnesses — Army Rangers who were at the club that night — would have bolstered his defense.
The Rangers told police the man they saw was tall, about 6-foot-1 or 6-foot-2, and Cash is 5-foot-10. The court found Cash suffered little from their lack of testimony, because a police officer read their statements into the trial record, so the jury had that evidence to consider.
So, the Supreme Court concluded Judge McBride ruled correctly when he denied Cash’s motion for a new trial.
“Cash has pointed to no basis for reversal of his conviction,” the justices wrote in their unanimous decision affirming the verdict and the life sentence.
Born in 1966, Cash today is 53 years old, and remains in the Rogers State prison in Reidsville, where his incarceration began April 20, 2017.