A man was accused of participating in the gang rape of a 9-year-old girl. He was acquitted.
And of beating up an inmate while incarcerated. He was acquitted.
And of accessing dozens of images of child porn. On Tuesday, a Uintah County judge dropped those charges at a prosecutor’s request.
Randall Flatlip spent more than two years in jail as these cases made their way through the system.
But now he’s back home at the Crow tribal lands in Montana. And his defense attorney, Loni DeLand, said when he called his client this week to tell him the last of his legal troubles were gone, Flatlip was relieved.
“He sobbed,” DeLand said.
The defense attorney said Thursday that he believes the 74 child porn charges were filed against his client in 2016 only as leverage for then-Uintah County Attorney G. Mark Thomas to get a plea deal in the rape case.
“I just flat-out don’t want to make deals for innocent clients,” DeLand said. “I don’t think those charges should have been filed.”
The defense attorney said there were child pornography images found in 2016 associated with Flatlip’s Google account, but added that Flatlip had given his password to at least six people and his laptop was in a pawn shop during the time in question.
A Vernal police detective wrote in charging documents that the case was referred to him by the FBI, where agents had received a report flagging Flatlip’s account for possible child porn.
But DeLand said the investigating officer did little work to verify that it was his client who actually viewed the images. Thomas still filed the 74 charges against Flatlip four months after the man had been charged with sexually abusing the 9-year-old girl.
Thomas, who lost his bid for re-election and now works in private practice in Colorado, said Thursday that plea negotiations in Flatlip’s cases were limited.
“I take great exception to defense counsel’s characterization that we filed the charges to obtain leverage,” he wrote in an email. “Plea negotiations did not include discussions of tying a plea deal together between the cases. All plea discussions were had based on the facts of each case independently.”
Thomas explained that when he first received the case, he believed there was a “sufficient nexus” between Flatlip’s email account and the child porn. He noted that while the case did not involve actually obtaining physical hard drives, which is the most common way to connect someone to illegal images, nothing in the law prevents prosecutors from trying to prove possession in another way.
In the rape case, the girl reported that four men had held her down and raped her in 2016 in a Vernal home while her mother was in a garage doing drugs. But defense attorneys argued at a trial last year that there was little evidence to corroborate the girl’s account — and a jury found the men not guilty.
Then, months later, Flatlip was acquitted in the jail assault case, too. DeLand said he argued at that trial that Flatlip was defending himself from a cellmate who had called him a “baby rapist” and had hit him. A jury agreed with the defense, and found Flatlip not guilty.
After he was acquitted in that case, DeLand asked that his client be released — which prosecutors did not oppose.
And after Thomas lost the election to local defense attorney Greg Lamb, DeLand said he asked for the case to be reconsidered. Prosecutors this week filed a motion asking that the case be dismissed “in the interest of justice.”
Lamb did not return a request for comment. The newly-elected county attorney had represented Flatlip’s brother, Jerry Flatlip, in the early stages of the rape case — but was not his attorney during last year’s trial.
