Parley Jeffs Dutson, who once was found guilty of killing his teenage girlfriend but had the verdict reversed on a technicality, has pleaded guilty to a charge of murder.
Dutson, 21, entered a guilty plea Tuesday to murder, a first-degree felony, for the 2007 shooting death of Kara Hopkins, 15, at a party. As part of a plea bargain, a second charge of aggravated sexual assault, a first-degree felony, was dropped.
"We felt very strongly that he needed to be convicted of the homicide," said Alicia Cook, spokeswoman for the Salt Lake District Attorney's Office. "We absolutely support the outcome, and we're glad to achieve that without having to go through another trial."
Dutson's defense lawyers contend Dutson was high at the time on liquor and a home-brewed tea of psychedelic mushrooms that impaired his judgment to such a degree that he was experiencing a "hallucinatory paranoid and irrational" level of fear and did not intend to kill the girl.
The aggravated sexual assault stemmed from information police provided prosecutors — that Dutson had been trying to tear Hopkins' clothing off and force her to have sex with him immediately, despite the presence of other people. Prosecutors contended Dutson grew enraged when the girl resisted, and he then engaged in a cat-and-mouse game of pointing the gun at the girl as she moved and ducked trying to get away from him, then dropping the gun to his side, only to resume pointing it again.
The girl was shot in the back of the head, and witnesses testified that Dutson was chanting as he knelt next to her nearly naked body.
A jury convicted him on both counts after a four-day trial in 2008. However, 3rd District Judge Royal Hansen ruled in May that Dutson deserved a new trial because one female juror did not disclose during jury selection that she had been a rape victim herself years earlier. The judge concluded that the omission violated Dutson's constitutional right to a fair trial from an impartial jury.
The woman at one point after the conviction told the court she did not include that information because she did not think about it during jury selection and does not view herself as a victim.
The judge previously had set a new jury trial for October.
Dutson, who has been in jail since his arrest when he was 18 years old, was described by his lawyer as one of the "Lost Boys" who grew up in the Fundamentalist LDS Church town of Colorado City, Ariz. Dutson left home at age 16, encountered a difficult life outside the FLDS world and ended up turning to alcohol and drugs, according to his attorney.
Dutson is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 9.
e-mail: lindat@desnews.com