Not guilty verdict concludes emotional court trial

POLSON — Late Friday afternoon, a district court jury returned a not guilty verdict for 24-year-old William Maus, who was on trial for negligent vehicular homicide while under the influence.

The charge stemmed from his involvement in a 2009 car crash on U.S. Highway 93 near the Ninepipes Lodge that resulted in the death of Joshua Stubbs, an 18-year-old from Dixon. A blood sample from Maus, taken several hours after the crash, revealed the presence of marijuana at levels that could have impaired his driving, law enforcement officials claimed.

The jury was also tasked with evaluating a secondary charge against Maus, negligent vehicular homicide. After almost five hours of deliberations, the jurors were unable to reach a verdict on this lesser included charge.

Before leaving the courtroom Friday morning, the jury heard closing statements from defense attorney Mike Sherwood and Deputy County Attorney Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson.

In his statement, Sherwood admitted that Maus made an extremely costly mistake, but asked the jury to remember that his client was on trial for a crime that, by definition, involves “considerably greater than a lack of ordinary care.”

“He wasn’t speeding through a school zone at 90 miles per hour,” Sherwood said. “This is not a case in which Willie was so grossly negligent that you, as jurors, should find him to have committed either offense.”

Sherwood suggested to the jury that they had received a “tailored” version of the truth from Cole-Hodgkinson.

According to Sherwood, the prosecution selected to interview only those witnesses who would provide testimony supporting the prosecution’s case; they failed to interview several witnesses at the scene of the crime and six health professionals who treated Maus following the accident and reported no signs of drug-induced impairment.

He encouraged the jury to instead examine the facts in their entirety.

“The truth that Willie told you had warts — but it was the whole truth,” Sherwood said about his client’s testimony.

In response, Cole-Hodgkinson rebutted Sherwood’s suggestion that the prosecution had presented a biased picture of events.

“A tailored truth is not untruth,” Cole-Hodgkinson said. “Would you want everyone with an opinion or everyone who saw even part of the events to be on the stand?”

She asked the jury to weigh the costs and benefits of Maus’s actions.

“In this case, the defendant made a choice. In making that choice, he took options away from Joshua Stubbs and Clinton Shor,” she said, referring to the victim and the driver of a logging truck, also involved in the accident. “Clinton Shor will feel guilt the rest of his life. Joshua Stubbs doesn’t have a ‘rest of his life.’”

In addition to the closing arguments, the jury had the opportunity to hear the testimony of multiple witnesses, including testimony from the defendant himself, Thursday afternoon.

From the witness stand, Maus described how he momentarily took his eyes of the road to move a pen from behind his ear to the passenger seat. According to Maus, when he looked back up, Stubbs’ red Explorer was decelerating rapidly, and he was unable to avoid hitting it.

“The red SUV lifted in front of my windshield, and as I slowed down, he came down,” Maus recalled during his testimony. “He whipped into the other lane where the logging truck t-boned, or broad-sided him, pushing him out of my line of vision.”

Toward the end of his client’s time on the stand, Sherwood asked him why he had never contacted the victim’s family. Maus replied that he wanted to, and in fact had thought about it many times, but was instructed by legal counsel not to do so. Sherwood then allowed Maus, for the first time, to address the Stubbs family seated directly in front of him.

“I’m really, really sorry,” Maus said, in tears. “If I could replace myself with him, I would do it instantaneously. I wish it would’ve never happened — no one should ever have to lose a son.”

During cross-examination, Cole-Hodgkinson honed in on the issue of impairment and asked Maus several questions about the timeline he had provided for the day of the accident.

She called into question his assertions that he had only taken one short hit of marijuana on the day of the accident, and that he used marijuana solely for medicinal purposes, namely for the pain of an ACL injury.

At no point prior to the accident did Maus attempt to obtain a medical marijuana license, Cole-Hodgkinson said. In fact, records that she obtained from Maus’s doctor showed that at a January appointment Maus described his knee as feeling “great.”

Following the verdict Friday afternoon, Maus, who is slated to graduate from the University of Montana later this spring, quietly celebrated with the approximately 15 family members and friends who had gathered to support him.

Members of Joshua Stubbs’ family, and some of the trial’s key witnesses who had sat with the family throughout the proceedings, appeared visibly upset before leaving the courtroom.

Cole-Hodgkinson said that she has not yet decided whether she will pursue a new trial for the lesser included charge.