Judge vacates manslaughter trial for Harley Park
BY TERRY SMITH
Judge Robert J. Elgee on Tuesday found that Harley Robert Park, charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death 13 years ago of a prominent Camas County businessman, is “incompetent” to stand trial.
Elgee further vacated a trial that was scheduled to start on June 6 in Blaine County 5th District Court. He ordered instead that Park be transported to a facility to be determined by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, that a new mental evaluation be conducted and that the court and defense and prosecution counsel review Park’s mental capacity in 90 days.
Elgee’s ruling follows an earlier reduction of a first-degree murder charge for Park to involuntary manslaughter. That decision was made by the Idaho Attorney General’s Office and was based upon information from an expert witness who was expected to testify at trial that Harley Robert Park was not of sound mental condition when he killed a man in Camas County in 2003.
The decision to amend the charge against Park was formalized on May 16 in Blaine County 5th District Court, which now has jurisdiction over the case. Deputy attorneys with the AG’s Office, which has been assigned as special prosecutor, acknowledged then that the charge was reduced because of “expert reports.”
Specifically, Hailey attorney Douglas Nelson, assigned as public defender for Park, informed the court and prosecution in an Oct. 13, 2015 memorandum that he would call as a trial witness Dr. Richard Worst, a Twin Falls psychiatrist who interviewed Park shortly after Park allegedly beat to death a prominent Fairfield businessman.
Nelson wrote in the memorandum that he intended to “raise mental illness as a defense” and that Worst would testify that Park “suffered from mental illness such that he could not form the sufficient mental state required to be convicted of first-degree murder.”
Park, now 38, is charged in the death of 61-year-old Lynn Stevenson on Sept. 3, 2003 at a golf course Stevenson owned near Soldier Mountain Ski Resort north of Fairfield.
According to a police report filed shortly after the death by Camas County Sheriff Dave Sanders, Park, who was staying and working at the golf course, killed Stevenson because Stevenson was “the devil.”
Park was being held without bond until Tuesday at the Elmore County Jail in Mountain Home. He has spent the majority of the past 13 years court committed to the State Hospital South mental institution in Blackfoot.