Simpson hearing rescheduled

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March 15, 2010

27-year-old wants murder conviction, life sentence set aside

Kenneth Hart/The Independent The Daily Independent Mon Mar 15, 2010, 10:24 PM EDT

Catlettsburg — A court hearing on a motion filed by convicted murderer Timothy Scott Simpson that had been scheduled to take place Monday was postponed until next month.

Boyd Circuit Judge C. David Hagerman said it was necessary to delay the matter because Simpson’s attorney, Joseph Lane of Prestonsburg, had not received several volumes of the transcript of Simpson’s 2007 trial.

Hagerman rescheduled the proceeding for 1 p.m. April 5.

Simpson, 27, has filed a motion seeking to have his murder conviction and life sentence set aside. He alleges his former attorney, Michael Curtis, failed to provide him with effective representation.

The hearing was originally set for March 3, but had to be postponed because Curtis, who’s expected to be called as a witness, was involved in the Timothy Emerson murder trial in Carter County.

Simpson was convicted in March 2007 of killing Faith Fields Clay, 28, of Flatwoods, by shooting her in the head with a 9 mm pistol with a makeshift silencer fashioned from a plastic two-liter soft drink bottle taped to the barrel. He was sentened to life, plus five years for evidence-tampering for moving the gun prior to police arriving at his Boyd Street apartment.

The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld Simpson’s conviction and sentence in June, but ordered that Hagerman resentence him because state law does not allow a defendant to be sentenced to a term of years to run consecutively with a life sentence.

Clay, who had been staying with Simpson for about three weeks prior to the shooting, was found on Simpson’s couch on Feb. 16, 2006, dead of a gunshot wound to her right eye. Police initially thought Clay’s death was a suicide. However, investigators began to suspect Simpson had shot Clay after learning he had been known to fire his gun around his apartment.

Simpson is in the Boyd County Detention Center and has been since Feb. 24, according to the jail’s Web site. He is serving his life sentence at the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville.

Under state sentencing guidelines, he will be eligible to meet with the parole board after he has served 20 years.

KENNETH HART can be reached at khart@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2654.

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