Questions Surrounding The Nick Hall Case

MARIETTA, OH — Nicholas Hall was arrested in May. Officials with the Washington County Sheriff's Office say the 18-year-old was in Georgia, used an app to disguise his number, made a number of bomb threats to area schools, and some schools outside the area. He was arrested in Georgia, questioned there, extradited after more than three weeks, and made his first court appearance in Washington County on June 3 where his bond was set at $2,000,000.

Live in Marietta? Click here to subscribe to our free breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox and mobile devices. Follow Marietta Patch on Facebook and Twitter, and download our free Patch mobile app on Android or iPhone.

Members of his family have shown concern for the situation, as has he. He's due in court tomorrow for a status hearing. Assistant Prosecutor David Silwani spoke about the situation. "Next we have a pretrial where usually we just have the attorneys meet in judge's chambers and go over all the legal housekeeping." He said they would be discussing preliminary offers and what kind of time he could be facing. It's likely this will not be public.

Silwani agreed to answer some of the lingering questions in the case. Prosecutor Nicole Coil also answered a number of the questions later.

Patch: He was just recently charged with a case in Georgia for a bomb threat, but that was dropped do you know why that was dropped?

Silwani: I don't know. I only control what happens here. I don't know why they would've. I'm not a Georgia attorney. I can't answer for them. You know what, I bet they probably dropped it so he could be extradited here.

Patch: I've spoken with his family. He's on medication, he receives Social Security for mental issues, is that going to play a factor in your guys' consideration on how to prosecute this? Or deals that might be made. He apparently wasn't on his medication at the time.

Silwani: Yes I saw your interview. There's really no right answer to that question. Every case you kind of have to take a holistic approach and see what serves justice, what serves the community. You have to take everything into consideration. Even let's say, hypothetically, he pleads guilty today, we would do a pre-sentence investigation and his mental health stuff would get brought up obviously that's something we and the court have to consider, it's a factor.

Coil: It depends if he's competent or not guilty by reason of insanity. If he's doesn't have a competency issue then it's a mitigating factor at sentencing. It wouldn't have anything to do with a resolution with the case. Unless he can't be found guilty by reason of insanity, which I don't think he is based on the conversations I've heard him have. He knew what he did, he understood the ramifications of what he was doing. I think he does have issues, but it's a mitigating factor in my opinion based on what I've heard and seen to this point. I haven't seen anything along those lines so we'll see what they have to say. What they produce, we will take that into consideration, I doubt it will have any impact until the sentencing phase.

Patch: Sure, so another thing. This is one thing the family has been adamant about. From the beginning at least, I haven't seen the investigation from the Sheriff's Office, he says he's only admitted to 12 of the 22 calls. He says there was a second person involved. Is that something you guys are aware of?

Silwani: I saw that. This is obviously an ongoing investigation so obviously if there are other people they're looking into it. I really can't comment on that especially since there's the potential of other people.

Patch: I don't know if this is your issue or not. He was arrested in Georgia, and there were investigators from Washington County that went down to question him there. But he wasn't even offered an attorney, at least a public defender, until he got back here. So the family doesn't think that's fair, that we can send resources down there to prosecute him, but the resources to defend him weren't there. And I think most people hearing that would say, that doesn't sound right.

Silwani: Everyone has a right to counsel, but the issue you're bringing up is a very complicated legal issue, we could spend hours talking about it. There's a whole class in law school dedicated to this issue. From a state and legal perspective I don't believe it's an issue. It's my understanding they read him his rights and he waived them.

Patch: That's my understanding too.

Silwani: Right, so he's an adult and he chose to waive those rights. That's his right as a citizen of the United States, he has the same rights as you, as I have the same rights.

Patch: But even if that wasn't the case, he would have had to wait almost a month before he was extradited to even get legal counsel.

Silwani: That's a Georgia problem, not an our problem. Every state is a different jurisdiction process that's wildly different.

Patch: Well why couldn't we send a public defender down if we could send investigators down to advise him after he was arrested and it was known he would be extradited here?

Silwani: I really can't comment because I don't know the answer to the question.

Coil: I'm not as privy to all the facts in Georgia as I am what happened when it came here. I've looked at all the files so I'm not sure exactly what happened down there. What I do know is what happened upon our law enforcement's action with him, everything was done properly and he certainly had no obligation to talk to them, but he chose to do so.

Patch: What about the $2,000,000 bond. I've spoken with the family and is that normal for a case like this?

Silwani: With pretty serious cases it's normal to have a high dollar bond. With how serious the charges are, with the amount of resources it took to get him, and the harm he's caused the community. One of the monetary factors is the danger to the community. We've spoken with the schools and there are still children that are afraid to go to school because of him. It's not like, oh I made some phone calls, these are real citizens, these are real kids, these are real teachers, these are real law enforcement officers. It wasn't just us, there were tons of other jurisdictions involved. I've seen higher bonds, I worked in other counties, I think it is a high bond, but justified in this case.

Patch: This is something I noticed, his lawyer didn't try to lower the bond. Nicole kind of even gave him an out she said she didn't want bond lowered, but if it was lowered, she didn't want it lowered to less than $1,000,000. His attorney didn't even attempt to lower it to that million. Because I've been in other jurisdictions and I've never seen it where an attorney doesn't get a lower bond.

Silwani: I've seen it. It happens more than you realize.

He went on to explain that this could be a tactic from Hall's attorney, it's hard to say. He might have wanted to reserve the bond argument until a later date. He noted that this was speculative and he has no firsthand knowledge. He did state that he knew Attorney Jack Blakeslee and knew him to be a good attorney, with likely a good strategy.

Coil said that it's likely that Blakeslee knew that there was no way to get the bond down to an amount that Hall or his family would be able to afford so it was a moot point.

Patch: Another thing, the Washington County Public Defender's Office couldn't represent him because of a conflict, they had to outsource to Noble County I believe. The issue I think is that so many kids were involved in this area, in a case like this usually one would assume there would be a change of venue because you could almost not avoid a conflict of interest or tainted jury pool you know.

Silwani: People think you can just magically change a venue. You have to wait until am jury is seated or attempted to be seated. It's actually really difficult to get a change of venue. I've heard of much smaller counties with much higher profile cases where they didn't change the venue. It's a very high burden to meet. And just because you've heard about a case doesn't mean you're prejudiced against it one way or the other. This won't even get addressed until it goes to trial if it goes to trial.

Have a news tip or suggestion on how I can improve Marietta Patch? Maybe you're interested in having your business become one of our latest sponsors? Email any and all inquiries to me at christopher.schmitt@patch.com