Allains again found guilty

By MICHAEL KRUSE

BROOKSVILLE - Guilty.

Again.

Lori Allain, 49, and Arthur "Tommy" Allain, 48, are the Hernando County couple who were found guilty in March of starving nearly to death the 10-year-old girl who was in their care. They were sentenced in April to 25 years in state prison. On Monday, though, they went against the advice of their attorneys by going to trial on the charges of failing to appear for the original start date of their abuse trial in late October.

The case was different. The result was not.

Circuit Judge Jack Springstead scheduled a sentencing hearing for July 13. Failing to appear is a third-degree felony. The Allains could get as many as five years tacked onto their current sentence.

"The state's pleased with the verdict," prosecutor Sherry Byerly said. "The state's position is that when you commit crimes, you have to be held accountable for each crime."

"We're pretty surprised," said Robert Christensen, Lori Allain's state-appointed attorney from Homosassa Springs. "We were very confident."

Said Elliott Ambrose, Tommy Allain's state-appointed attorney from Brooksville: "I'm disappointed as hell."

So, clearly, were the Allains. But their collective reaction to the verdict came in the form of profane, postverdict outbursts in the courtroom.

When Byerly, the prosecutor, asked Springstead to impose the maximum of five years, Tommy Allain said: "I'll be dead. I'll be 80, lady."

Lori Allain turned around to face friends and family members in the courtroom and told them to "get the f--- out of this country while you can.''

"F--- this government," she added. There was a finger involved.

The Allains were arrested in June 2004 and accused of starving to 29 pounds the 10-year-old girl in their long-term, nonrelative care. They skipped their trial in late October and went on the lam before being caught in New Jersey in January. They were extradited and have been in the Hernando County Jail ever since.

On the failure-to-appear case, the State Attorney's Office never made a formal offer for a plea deal, said Byerly, because the Allains told their attorneys they wouldn't even consider the idea.

"If they want to give me another five, give me another five ... ," Lori Allain said in an interview last month at the jail. "But they're going to have to prove to somebody that we did something wrong."

For a brief moment Monday morning, Christensen and Ambrose seemed to have the Allains at least thinking about pleading no contest, which probably would have led to a short sentence - and even that almost certainly would have been lumped into the sentence they're already serving.

But it didn't happen.

For this trial, the attorneys' files were much, much thinner than for the last one. There was only so much to discuss.

The question was basically this: The notice-to-appear form both the Allains signed at their pretrial Oct. 4 told them to appear on Oct. 24. Court was closed that day due to the effects of Hurricane Wilma. The Allains never received any official documentation telling them to be there the next day.

"The issue is: Did they have the proper notice required by law?" Ambrose said to the jury in his opening statement.

"You will never see anything that says Oct. 25," Christensen told them.

"It's true," Byerly said, "that the notice to appear did not say anything about a continuing obligation." But she said "common sense" should have told the Allains to come back the next day. She said everybody else was there: the judge, the attorneys, the court reporter, the court clerks, the media.

So why weren't the Allains? she asked.

The state called three witnesses.

A court reporter was on the stand for six minutes.

One of the Allains' neighbors testified for five minutes.

An investigator from New Jersey took four minutes.

Then the state rested.

The defense called three witnesses, too, and their testimony added up to 26 minutes.

The closing arguments of Ambrose and Christensen summed up the stance of the defense: The Allains called their bondsman three times Oct. 24 and were told not to worry and that the trial would be rescheduled and to wait for more instructions. Tommy Allain went to work in Tampa the morning of Oct. 25. The attorneys said this was proof their failure to appear started as an innocent case of clerical confusion.

"They chose not to appear," Byerly countered in her closing. "They chose to run."

The jury was out for not quite 40 minutes.

The court clerk read the guilty verdicts.

"May you all rot in hell," Tommy Allain grumbled at the jurors as they filed out of the courtroom.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.