Supreme Court denies kidnapper’s request
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HELENA — On Dec. 3 the Montana Supreme Court denied a request to consider new evidence made by Chuck Devlin, 63, who is serving a 50-year sentence for the May 2006 kidnapping of an 18-year-old Bigfork woman.
Devlin argued in a Nov. 20 petition that a jury would not have convicted him of the kidnapping if they knew there was a legal mandate to complete the rescue of a temporarily incapacitated person. He claimed he was giving a drunken teenager shelter from a storm in the middle of the night, instead of kidnapping her. He wrote that in 1986 he was convicted of aggravated assault for not giving a drunk shelter during a thunderstorm.
The court did not agree with his arguments.
“The issues presented here were, or could have been raised in the direct appeal or in the petition for post-conviction relief,” the court wrote.
Devlin is also procedurally barred from asking for a new trial because he has been “adjudged guilty of an offense in a court of record and has exhausted the remedy of appeal,” the court wrote. Devlin’s trial was held in Lake County.
This is Devlin’s third time to have the high court consider petitions involving convictions resulting from a May 16 incident where a naked woman sprang from his van and asked police to help her. Police were responding to calls about screams coming from a van in southern Bigfork.
He was convicted in 2007 after an initial mistrial on kidnapping charges and sentenced as a persistent felony offender. In a separate case that was pursued concurrently with the kidnapping charges Devlin entered into a plea agreement to serve a 20-year term with 15 suspended for felony bail jumping.
In 2009 the Montana Supreme Court denied a motion for venue in the bail jumping case. That same year the court denied another appeal from Devlin, but also ordered that his written judgment be corrected so that a conviction for obstructing a peace officer was documented as a misdemeanor and not a felony.
Devlin is not eligible for parole until 2032.
