Private attorney back on Weitzel defense
No saying how Bugden will be paid for services
Wed, Dec 19, 2001
By NESREEN KHASHAN
Standard-Examiner Davis Bureau
FARMINGTON -- Psychiatrist Robert Weitzel's public
defender told a 2nd District Judge Tuesday that the doctor's former private
attorney would be co-counsel on the case.
Wally Bugden was Weitzel's private attorney for much of this year, but then
stepped back after the doctor went broke. Neither Bugden nor Weitzel's public
defender, Glen Cella, explained how the private attorney would be paid for his
services, if at all.
"Mr. Bugden has been brought in at my request," Cella said when
asked about the matter.
Weitzel is charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of
five patients.
Earlier this year the court denied a motion by Weitzel to have his private
attorney fees paid for by the state.
The doctor was further assured that he wouldn't be able to scrape the funds
together himself when the latest trial judge assigned to the case denied the
doctor's motion asking for the return of $15,000 in bail money.
Second District Judge Rodney S. Page told Weitzel during the Farmington
pretrial hearing that because there was no "material change" in his
circumstances, the request was denied.
The charges against Weitzel, 44, of Salt Lake City, are in connection with
the deaths of five elderly patients at the Davis Hospital and Medical Center's
geriatric-psychiatric unit. The patients died during a 16-day span that began in
December 1995.
The doctor was convicted of those charges last year and served six months in
prison. Then in January 2nd District Judge Thomas Kay threw out that conviction,
ruling that prosecutors had withheld an expert witness who may have benefited
the defense.
After a long and bitter battle by prosecutors to remove him, Kay was taken
off the case last month by a fellow judge who in his memorandum criticized the
state for attacking a peer.
Cella said Tuesday that he would within a month file a motion asking for
an outright dismissal of the Weitzel case, based on the way prosecutors had
handled the first trial.
No trial date has been set,
Copyright ©2001, Ogden Publishing Corporation