Judge drops case as double jeopardy

An Oregon man whose prostitution case was heard in federal and state courts in Missoula has now had his case dismissed in Flathead County.

On April 7, two counts of promoting prostitution and one count of aggravated promotion of prostitution, all felonies, were dismissed against Clifton Ray Dwayne Oliver, 40.

He already had been sentenced in 2014 in Missoula County District Court on a felony count of tampering with a witness. Federal charges related to transporting a minor for prostitution were dropped in 2013.

All three cases stem from the same 2012 arrest in which police linked Oliver to running a prostitution business out of a Missoula hotel and promoting it online.

Through the investigation, police alleged that Oliver also did business on multiple occasions out of a hotel in Kalispell.

Prosecutors hit snags with three jurisdictions circling the same set of evidence, leading the Flathead County case to be dismissed on the grounds of double jeopardy. For Oliver, it means he avoided a prostitution conviction in three cases.

Police arrested Oliver in February 2012 after an undercover sting at a Missoula hotel.

An officer met one of the women at the hotel and she allegedly told him that Oliver would bring her from Spokane to Kalispell and Missoula for prostitution. Police learned that another girl working for Oliver was 16 years old, according to court documents.

Oliver was charged in Missoula County with promoting prostitution and tampering with a witness.

On April 1, 2012, the U.S. Attorney indicted Oliver for transporting people, including the 16-year-old girl, across state lines for prostitution. A superceding indictment filed in May that year included a tampering charge, since Oliver sent letters to one of the girls urging her to withhold testimony.

The federal case continued through the rest of 2012. In January 2013, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen signed an order declaring that Oliver was not mentally competent to stand trial.

According to that document, multiple doctors evaluated Oliver. He refused medication and suffered from hallucinations that hindered his judgment, they concluded. The judge wrote that Oliver didn’t have the ability to understand the case against him.

On June 18, 2013, the federal case was dismissed.

The Missoula County case resumed the following year. Oliver took a plea deal and on Feb. 18, 2014, he pleaded guilty to one count of tampering with a witness. The count of promoting prostitution was dismissed.

Oliver was sentenced to four years with the Montana Department of Corrections.

Six months later, the Flathead County Attorney’s Office charged Oliver for allegedly running prostitution out of the Holiday Inn Express in Kalispell. The evidence arose in the original Missoula investigation, according to Flathead County court documents. Detectives placed Oliver in Kalispell on three occasions in 2011 and 2012.

One woman allegedly told investigators that she traveled with Oliver through Montana, Washington and California as a prostitute. Another said that they came to Kalispell several times.

Oliver pleaded not guilty to the Flathead County charges. He had been scheduled for trial on May 5.

Brent Getty, Oliver’s public defender, moved to dismiss the case on the grounds of double jeopardy. He argued that this case stems from the same circumstances as the Missoula County case, for which he had already been convicted and sentenced.

Deputy County Attorney Stacy Bowman countered that the Missoula conviction was ultimately for witness tampering. The Flathead County charges were different — promoting prostitution — and therefore would not yield a repeated conviction.

Flathead County District Judge Ted Lympus accepted the double jeopardy claim and dismissed the case on April 7.

At the end of it all, Oliver stands convicted of one count of tampering with a witness out of three prostitution cases. He remains in a correctional facility in Glendive, more than a year into his four-year sentence.

Reporter Matt Hudson may be reached at 758-4459 or by email at mhudson@dailyinterlake.com.