Cody Marble, 23, was convicted in 2002 of raping a 13-year-old boy at the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center. Although he has maintained from the beginning that he is innocent of the sex offense, Marble has admitted to using drugs, and pleaded guilty in June to criminal possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.
At a Missoula District Court hearing on Tuesday, Judge Doug Harkin sentenced Marble on the probation violation, sending him to the Montana State Prison for a term of 15 years with 10 years suspended. That sentence will run consecutive to Marble's actual drug sentence. Lawyers have reached a plea bargain in that case, and are calling for a five-year commitment to the Department of Corrections with immediate placement in the Nexus Treatment Center, a meth-specific inpatient treatment program in Butte.
That didn't make a lot of sense to Paul Sells, a licensed addiction counselor in Missoula who evaluated Marble and testified at Tuesday's sentencing hearing.
“He needs treatment,” Sells said. “He's been to prison, he was released, he violated his probation, he went back to prison. I don't think prison is working.”
Sells said nine months of highly structured, meth-specific drug treatment would go a long way toward addressing Marble's criminal thinking patterns, whereas the Montana State Prison's standard short-term care programs are not similarly geared. Sells also noted that Marble “has done well when he's on tight supervision.”
Based on Sells' testimony, Marble's public defender, Rob Henry, asked the judge to impose a 15-year commitment to the Department of Corrections with 10 years suspended. That sentence would have run consecutive to the drug sentence, for a total DOC commitment of 10 years, followed by 10 more years on probation.
But Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul objected to the sentence, saying it failed to address the threat Marble poses to the community as a sex offender.
“I don't think anything has changed between 2003 and 2008,” Paul said. “I think he needs treatment, but it's my recommendation that he receive that treatment at the tail end of a prison sentence.”
Harkin has sent Marble to jails, juvenile programs and prison since he was age 14, and has seen him repeatedly violate probation or parole rules by using marijuana and methamphetamine. Before the rape conviction, however, Marble had no felonies on his record.
“Given the amount of time that I have been working with Cody Marble with almost no success, where is he most ready to get started with treatment? ” Harkin asked Sells. “And it's a loaded question, because I've sent him to every treatment program and he didn't follow through.”
But Sells said those programs were community-based and did not offer the sort of structured, long-term inpatient care that Nexus specializes in.
A Missoula District Court jury convicted Marble in November 2002, mostly on the testimony of the alleged victim and other juvenile jail inmates. There was no physical evidence at all of the rape, which Marble says the other boys made up to get back at him for perceived slights, or to seek out more favorable treatment in their own criminal cases.
Before going to trial, Marble ignored defense counsel's advice to plead guilty to the rape charge in exchange for a three-year deferred sentence, avoiding a prison term. But Marble insisted on a trial, was convicted and received the 20-year sentence.
Marble has failed at every attempt to overturn the conviction, and in December a judge denied his petition for post-conviction relief. He is currently appealing that denial before the Montana Supreme Court.
In May, a Missoulian State Bureau investigation revealed that one of Marble's sex offense counselors believes the man may be innocent. Another sex-offender therapist and psychologist who examined Marble after his conviction says the same, and has made a sworn statement saying he thinks the crime never occurred.
Reporter Tristan Scott can be reached at 523-5264 or at tscott@missoulian.com.
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