A former soldier will get a new trial on charges that he attacked his then-girlfriend after nearly half of the record of his original trial disappeared.
The D.C. Court of Appeals has set aside Benjamin Egbuka’s conviction of assault and threats because about 40 percent of his trial transcript disappeared. That forced a team of lawyers and a new judge to try to reconstruct Egbuka’s trial from notes and memories, which the appellate panel said wasn’t fair to Egbuka.
“Here, Egbuka … made Herculean efforts” to reconstruct a record of his trial, “but was thwarted at virtually every turn,” Associate Judge Kathryn A. Oberly wrote.
Egbuka was convicted of attacking his then-girlfriend, Dana Beepath-Hardy, in an incident near her apartment on Georgia Avenue NW in 1998. Police said he had grabbed her and menaced her with a BB gun that looked like a real handgun. He said people misunderstood an exchange with his then-girlfriend.
Egbuka was stationed with the Army in South Korea at the time and had flown back because, he claimed, Beepath-Hardy was talking about killing herself. The trial lasted six days. Only two full days of transcript survived, Oberly wrote.
“…[W]e do not know why Judge [Reggie] Walton ruled as he did because the basis for his ruling, if he offered one at all, is contained in a portion of the transcript that is missing,” Oberly wrote.
Walton has since been appointed to a lifetime term on the federal bench. When Egbuka appealed his conviction, it fell to another judge to read from Walton’s bench notes and to confer with attorneys to try to reconstruct the trial transcript.
It’s now up to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to decide whether to retry Egbuka on the decade-old case.
