Calendar call is Monday morning, Oct. 7, for Dade County Superior Court's fall session. Dade has only two regular jury trial sessions per year, one in October and the other in April. Misdemeanor trials start on Monday. Two civil cases are scheduled for the following week, the week of Oct. 14. Then criminal trials will begin Monday, Oct. 21.
In the normal course of judicial events, many defendants negotiate pleas with prosecutors before their scheduled day in court, and thus do not go to trial at all; and
many other cases are routinely "continued," which is to say postponed, until a later court session. But for what it's worth, here are some criminal cases still on the docket at this writing for the October session:
Steven Daniel Wooten (left), Jeremiah Lee Dalton and Charles Andrew Gass are all scheduled to go to trial Oct. 21 on chop shop charges. This is pursuant to a Sand Mountain raid in February at which Dalton and Gass were arrested. Wooten fled
and was apprehended and charged in March.
Randolph Seth Hodnett is also scheduled for trial in October, in his case for serious injury by vehicle, DUI, open container and failure to report an accident.
Substitute teacher Amanda Lenae Pardue is on the Oct. 21 trial docket, her trial having been continued twice since her September 2018 arrest. (Dade Superior had a "bonus" criminal trial session this January at which her case was scheduled, but it was postponed in order for the defendant to undergo psychiatric evaluation.) She stands accused of using computer services to "seduce, solicit, lure or entice" underage boys for sexual purposes.
Gustavo Pagan Rodriguez has been locked up in the Dade jail since last November for homicide by vehicle in one of the bizarre string of fatal interstate accidents in Dade the week before Thanksgiving. After the big rig he was driving crossed the I-59 median and killed the driver of another tractor-trailer going the opposite direction, Rodriguez was originally charged with DUI, but that charge was thrown out in February when his toxicology report came back clean for both drugs and alcohol. He gave police conflicting accounts of the accident, but his defense attorney attorney asked prosecutors at the February proceedings if the officers had
understood English was not the driver's first language.
Blayton Trevor Bethune faces trial this session in connection with the July 2018 death of his passenger in a midnight crash on Highway 136 East. He is charged with homicide by vehicle as well as DUI.
James Bryan Livingston faces an unusual laundry list of charges including methamphetamine and marijuana counts but mostly consisting of improper hunting-related charges. Some of these are killing deer at night, hunting without a license, criminal trespass, hunting from a motor vehicle and discharging a gun across a public road.
Bradley Dakoda Bell faces assault battery and trespass charges, Zachary Tyler long cruelty to children and battery charges, and Bryan Keith Weathers aggravated child molestation.
There are also a number of drug cases and lesser criminal offenses scheduled for court in this October session.
