Prosecutors: State has no intention of quizzing Nasser Hamad about case

Staff report

WARREN

Prosecutors say state agents, such as jail personnel, prosecutors and deputies, “have no intention of initiating any case-related conversations” with murder defendant Nasser Hamad of Howland.

“The state, however, cannot stop the defendant himself from initiating or engaging in conversation with state agents,” prosecutors Chris Becker and Michael Burnett said in a new filing in the Hamad case.

Hamad, 47, is charged with two counts of aggravated murder and several counts of attempted aggravated murder in the deaths of two young men and the shootings of three other people who came to his house in a dispute.

If Hamad would make statements that were obtained illegally, his rights still would be protected by the opportunity to ask the court for such statements to be suppressed from evidence, the prosecutors said.

Hamad’s attorney, Geoffrey Oglesby, filed a motion March 6 asking that Judge Ronald Rice restrain “agents for the state” from engaging Hamad in conversations about the charges he faces or talking about his “character, history and background.”

Prosecutors said Hamad also is asking the judge to restrain “a plethora” of individuals who are not state agents from speaking to him.

“It is not feasible to require the state to exclude [nonstate agents] from speaking to him,” the filing says.

The “others” are apparently people such as fellow inmates and social workers who might come in contact with Hamad.

Hamad’s motion says that “in similar cases,” jail personnel, law-enforcement officers and inmates “may attempt to obtain information from defendant in the hopes of assisting the state in its case.”

In fact, inmates have been known to act “on his own or under state direction, based on the hope or promise that information obtained from defendant can be traded for favorable treatment in his or her own case,” Hamad’s filing said.

But prosecutors said Hamad’s motion “essentially serves no purpose” because statements are “suppressed for constitutional violations, not for violations of court orders, the existence of which may or may not even be known by all conceivable state agents.”