The judge overseeing Richard Allen’s murder trial and the Indiana attorney general have asked the state Supreme Court to deny a petition that would reinstate Allen’s original defense attorneys and remove the judge from the case.
Judge Fran Gull and Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, have filed a response to a petition from attorneys not directly affiliated with the case, who asked the Indiana Supreme Court to replace Gull. Gull and Rokita argue in their response that the petition should be rejected because it fails to meet proper requirements, Scripps News reported.
Gull and Rokita wrote that the petition from the attorneys was inappropriate, and that Allen should have appealed the withdrawal of his original defense team, which he hasn’t done. The judge and AG also argued that Allen didn’t express a “clear and unquestioned” right to reinstate his attorneys, while saying his Sixth Amendment rights were not violated.
Gull argued that it was those rights she was protecting when she removed Andrew Baldwin and Brad Rozzi as Allen’s original defense attorneys following a leak of sensitive case material from Baldwin’s office. A former employee of Baldwin’s has been charged over that leak.
Gull also argued that Rozzi and Baldwin jeopardized the case by failing to report the leak in a timely fashion, not safeguarding case materials, and making statements that could prejudice the case and providing false information to the court.
Earlier this month, attorneys Mark Leeman and Cara Wieneke filed a Writ of Mandus arguing that Allen, who is accused of killing two teenage girls, has had his rights violated by Judge Gull, Fox 59 reported. In particular, the two point to Allen’s right to a speedy trial and Gull’s alleged bias against the defense.
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Allen, 51, is accused of murdering 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German in a case that has attracted national attention. Allen’s original court-assigned attorneys, Baldwin and Rozzi, withdrew from the case in late October – the circumstances of which form part of the basis for Leeman and Wieneke’s filing.
Attorneys Leeman and Weineke asked the Supreme Court to install a new judge. In addition, Leeman and Weineke argued that replacing the original attorneys violated Allen’s constitutional right to a speedy trial, as the trial was initially set to begin in January 2024 but now won’t start until mid-October 2024.
Baldwin and Rozzi had already filed a brief with the Indiana Supreme Court to investigate Judge Gull’s handling of the case.
For his part, Allen wrote in a letter that he wanted Baldwin and Rozzi to represent him.
“I want Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Rozzi to continue to represent me until this case is resolved, one way or the other. I believe they are acting in a manner that is in my best interest,” he wrote in his letter to Gull.
Allen, a CVS worker and father, is accused of forcing Abby and Libby off of a trail they were hiking and into a wooded area, where he allegedly killed them both.
The defense team, however, said the girls were killed by “[m]embers of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists.”
“Richard Allen has zero connections to any pagan cult or pagan cultists, and furthermore no forensic evidence (such as DNA) or electronic evidence links Richard Allen to the girls or to the crime scene – i.e., he is a completely innocent man,” they wrote.
