Technicality forces Goggles charges to be dropped
By Walter Cook
Staff Writer

Felony charges have been dismissed in a Montana court against an Arapahoe-area man and 2006 Fremont County Commission candidate because a prosecutor waited too long to file the requisite documents in the case.
White Otter Goggles, 27, had been charged with aggravated burglary, aggravated kidnapping and felony assault stemming from a November 2006 incident in Missoula, Mont. Goggles was accused of breaking into a couple’s home with an accomplice, holding its residents at gunpoint, binding them with duct tape and dousing them with pepper spray.
Goggles turned himself into Montana authorities on March 9 after nearly four months on the lam.
Missoula Police Department detectives said Goggles and his alleged accomplice, Patrick Little, broke into the home in retaliation for an earlier burglary.
The alleged female victim, who identified Little, admitted to police she had stolen some property from her ex-boyfriend, and that Goggles and Little demanded the whereabouts of the goods and threatened her.
In his motion seeking dismissal, filed in Montana’s Fourth Judicial District Court, Goggles argued that the slow pace of the Missoula County Attorney’s Office had resulted in a severe hardship.
States Judge Ed McLean in his Oct. 17 order granting Goggles’s motion to dismiss: “The defendant alleges that he has been severely prejudiced and traumatized in that he sat in jail for 64 days before his Native American tribe in Wyoming (Goggles is a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe) could raise his bail (which was $100,000), and then was forced to live in his automobile for another 68 days, without the support of family or friends, because the state had taken his identification from him, before the state finally filed leave to file an information in district court.
“During all this time — 216 days from the date the complaint was filed — defendant was never offered a preliminary hearing, he never waived his right to a preliminary hearing and probable cause to charge him of the felony offense was never determined by a court,” McLean said.
Under Montana law, after a preliminary hearing has been held in a lower court, or a waiver of a preliminary hearing or a leave of court has been granted, a prosecutor has 30 days to file charges in district court.
That didn’t happen in Goggles’s case. The judge said that even after 322 days following the filing of the prosecution’s initial complaint, an information had not been filed.
“There is now a serious speedy trial issue,” McLean said. “While the court is not happy about dismissing the very serious charges in this matter, in light of the state’s failure to timely establish probable cause and prosecute the charges against the defendant, the court finds the defendant has shown he has been severely prejudiced and traumatized by the delay.”
Despite the ruling, the Missoula County Attorney’s Office has not given up on the case, having filed an appeal Nov. 5 in Montana Supreme Court.