Supreme Court won't reconsider Aceto ruling

The Montana Supreme Court won't reconsider its ruling for a new trial on kidnapping and attempted murder charges for Joseph Aceto.

Appellate defenders Chad Wright and Kristina Guest said Friday that the Supreme Court's reversal of Aceto's convictions takes effective immediately.

The court overturned Aceto's 2002 conviction and sentence of 210 years in prison. The justices said Flathead District Judge Ted Lympus violated Aceto's rights when he didn't warn Aceto before having him removed from the courtroom after Aceto exploded in a rage that left his victim quaking.

A jury found Aceto guilty of kidnapping his former girlfriend, Eileen Holmquist, and attempting to kill her and a friend.

During his trial, at which Aceto defended himself, he screamed obscenities and flung a file while he questioned Holmquist. Lympus had Aceto removed from the courtroom; he watched the rest of the trial on a monitor in his jail cell.

The Supreme Court ruled that violated Aceto's constitutional right to participate in his own trial.

Lympus maintains that Aceto waived that right with his behavior. He would do the same thing again, given the same circumstances, Lympus said.

Some jurors in the trial praised Lympus for taking control of a situation that left Holmquist and some jurors in tears.

Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath asked the high court to reconsider its ruling.

"I didn't expect them to reconsider," Lympus said Friday. "We'll do what they say."

Now, Aceto will be returned from Montana State Prison to stand trial again.

That will be difficult, County Attorney Ed Corrigan said previously.

Holmquist killed herself after the trial. She was a key witness whose testimony will now not be available to a new jury.

At Aceto's first trial, she testified that Aceto shot at her and her friend, Rocky Hoerner, in Columbia Falls, and then held her captive in the North Fork in May 2000.

Aceto has a long history of violent crime, including bombing an airplane, a courthouse and National Guard trucks; first-degree murder and assault with intent to kill. He killed a man while in a prison in the South.

He was a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program after he testified against others in some of the bombing cases.

Corrigan was unavailable for comment Friday afternoon.