Fred R. Pewitt spent 30 years in the Indiana Department of Correction for a murder and kidnapping case out of Jasper County; once that sentence was over, Porter County prosecutors filed an attempted murder charge against him in a related case.
Now, Pewitt, 51, formerly of Hammond, is asking for the Porter County charge, for allegedly shooting at a sheriff’s deputy, to be dismissed because the delay violates Pewitt’s right to a speedy trial, according to the filing.
More Top Picks Best Rechargeable Book Lights
“At all times from October 20, 1994 forward, the State knew the Defendant’s exact location: it directed the hold that kept him in custody, it prosecuted and sentenced him in the Jasper County cause, and it housed him in its own Department of Correction. Nothing prevented the State from bringing him before this Court at any time,” defense attorney Jesse Harper wrote in the Monday filing.
“Notwithstanding that knowledge, the State took no action whatsoever to prosecute this cause for more than three decades.”
The Porter County charges against Pewitt, felony counts of attempted murder and resisting law enforcement, were filed back in 1994, Armando Salinas, chief deputy prosecutor in the Porter County Prosecutor’s Office, has said. Once his Jasper County sentence was complete, he was released to Porter County on an old warrant from 1994.
“More than thirty-one (31) years have elapsed between the filing of the Information and the Defendant’s arrest on these charges in December 1994 and the State’s first effort to prosecute this cause,” Harper wrote in the filing. “None of that delay is attributable to any act of the Defendant.”
The state, Harper argued, had one year once Pewitt was in custody in the Jasper County case to move forward with the Porter County case. That window closed Dec. 12, 1995, according to the filing.
“The Defendant was not brought to trial — indeed, it would seem, was never brought before this Court at all — within that period, nor in the three decades that followed,” the filing states.
The delay, the filing notes, impairs Pewitt’s defense because the memories of witnesses fade and their availability is unknown, and the ability to find and re-examine physical evidence after 31 years is compromised.
Pewitt also “has lost forever the possibility of resolving this charge while serving his Jasper County sentence, including any opportunity to seek concurrent sentencing or to participate in institutional programming with this matter resolved — a form of prejudice unique to an accused already imprisoned whom the State declines to try,” the filing states.
The Porter County charge was filed March 12 and Pewitt was taken into custody within days of his discharge from the Department of Correction.
On Oct. 20, 1994, the day before murder and kidnapping charges were filed in Jasper County, police from various departments, including the Porter County Sheriff’s Department, were in pursuit of Pewitt, who hijacked a pickup truck and forced the driver to drive him at gunpoint, according to charging documents.
A sheriff’s deputy was following the truck when the passenger, later identified as Pewitt, “stuck a small caliber handgun out of the rear window of the hijacked pickup truck and fired at a sheriff’s deputy, charges state.
As the deputy was trying to stop the pickup truck, he observed a flash on the muzzle of the handgun two or three times. The deputy was able to shoot out the left rear tire of the pickup truck and stop it.
After Pewitt was apprehended, according to the charges, scrapings were taken from the top edge of the driver’s side door, where it appeared to have been struck by a bullet. After examination by an Indiana State Police lab, investigators “determined the presence of lead in the paint scrapings, consistent with a bullet striking the vehicle,” charges state.
The Jasper County charges were filed Oct. 21, 1994, and he was sentenced on May 15, 1995, after pleading guilty to murder and kidnapping April 17, 1995, according to online court records. A third felony charge, for criminal confinement, was dismissed as part of the plea agreement.
Pewitt remains in Porter County Jail, held on $100,000 bond. He has requested a hearing on his motion to dismiss the case. The next hearing in the case, according to an online court docket, is scheduled for 9 a.m. Aug. 12 before Porter Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Clymer.