49-year-old Marshall Rice faces decades in jail after Superior Court Judge Rusty Smith found him guilty of assaulting three Habersham County Deputies during a traffic stop in 2013. The bench trial, sans jury, lasted only one day.
Rice is sentenced to 20 years for each of three counts of aggravated assault on a peace officer. He got an additional 5 years for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. A lesser charge netted him another 5 years.
Of the 8 counts against him, Judge Smith found him not guilty of two. Count 8 was possession of methamphetamine. Smith determined the state had not proven possession because the passenger in the truck (Timothy Barrett of Cornelia) had equal access to the drugs. Due to the not guilty verdict on that count, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony was also off the table because the drug charge was the felony supporting the charge.
The charges all stem from a traffic stop at Historic Highway 441 and Old Habersham Mills Road in Demorest just after midnight on October 21, 2013. Deputy Tonya Elrod had asked fellow deputies Graham Arrowood and Sgt. Greg Chastain to be on the lookout for a pick-up truck believed to be involved in the theft of Jet Skis recovered in the same area earlier in the day. Arrowood and Chastain spotted the truck, initiated a traffic stop and called Deputy Elrod who headed to the scene.
Dash camera video, played in court more than once on Monday, shows her arrival. She walked up to the truck and asked Mr. Rice to step out. She repeated this request then placed her hand on the door. She described from the witness stand what happened next, “The door began to open, the next thing I knew there was a gun in my face and I heard a click.”
The gun apparently jammed. Deputy Arrowood ran to tackle Rice and, as they struggled, Deputy Chastain says he saw the automatic pistol in Rice’s hand and fired his own service weapon. The truck’s back window shattered as bullets struck Rice in the head. In court today, a jagged scar was visible on the back of his scalp.
It was an unusual scene at the Habersham County Courthouse in Clarkesville as Rice stood in his yellow prison jumpsuit questioning the officers he was accused of attacking. He decided to represent himself in the trial with Attorney Elizabeth Pendleton serving as backup council. Long-time court workers say they can’t remember a pro se felony case happening here before and say defendants representing themselves in any serious action is a rarity.
Rice is a gaunt man, balding and gray, covered in neck tattoos. Six armed guards, some wearing Kevlar, surrounded the defense table where he sat and eyed him cautiously each time he approached the podium. When addressing witnesses, he often refered to himself in the third person. “Did you know that it was Mr. Rice driving that truck when you pulled him over?”
His cross examination was well prepared if a bit jumbled at times. At several points he admitted to pulling the gun on Deputy Elrod and other facts of the crime while questioning witnesses but the Judge says he can’t legally consider those slips “admissions of guilt.”
Before he was sentenced, Rice addressed the court claiming the attack on Deputy Elrod was an attempt to get the officers to kill him, “Nobody was supposed to die that night except for me. It wasn’t my intention to kill any cops that night.” He claimed the gun was never loaded despite eyewitness and forensic testimony to the contrary.
Judge Smith commented on the defense performance during sentencing, “Mr. Rice is able to grasp complex concepts of law, to respond to objections and to even cooperate with the state in the presentation of the case. That makes this all the more tragic because obviously this is a life that was wasted. Mr. Rice had far more potential than this.” But the defendant’s calm demeanor in court also struck Smith for another reason. He noted that, during cross examination of the woman he is convicted of trying to shoot, “You (Rice) showed not one iota of remorse, concern, empathy or sympathy.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the defendant was sentenced to 85 years due to confusion during that phase of the trial. Those numbers have been corrected to reflect the true sentence of 70 years.
