A Mobile County murder case that was set to go to trial this week is instead headed for a legal fight over whether prosecutors can bring the charge back after asking a judge to dismiss it. Haratio Donzell Stewart, 34, of Mobile, was scheduled to stand trial on a murder charge this week. Instead, prosecutors with the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office asked that the case be dismissed, citing “evidentiary issues” that prevented them from moving forward.
Mobile County Circuit Judge Brandy Hambright granted the request, dismissing the charges while allowing prosecutors the option to reinstate them at a later date. That arrangement — a dismissal without prejudice, in the language of the courts — is precisely what has put the case on a collision course with Alabama’s double jeopardy protections, and it has set up a hearing that could determine whether Stewart can ever be tried for the killing at all.
Case stems from 2023 Christmas Eve shooting
The charges against Stewart stem from a shooting on Christmas Eve 2023 at the Maison De Ville apartments in Mobile. Jabyron Nettles died in the shooting, and his girlfriend, Jelaysia Smith, suffered serious injuries. The case had been pending for nearly three years before this week’s scheduled trial date.
The delay between arrest and trial is not unusual for serious felony cases in Mobile County, where circuit dockets carry heavy loads of homicide prosecutions and defense continuances are common. But nearly three years is long enough that the timeline itself has become part of the defense’s argument, and Stewart’s attorney has made the elapsed time a central theme in his filings.
Holiday-season crimes carry a particular weight in how cases unfold. The Maison De Ville shooting — on one of the calendar’s most family-centered nights — drew attention when it happened, and the death of Nettles left Smith, who survived serious injuries, as the person closest to the events in a position no girlfriend should occupy. The case’s return to court has reopened all of it for both families.
Defense objects, seeks reconsideration
Defense attorney Chase Dearman objected to the dismissal-with-option-to-reinstate arrangement. On Tuesday, he filed a court motion asking Judge Hambright to reconsider her decision. The judge has scheduled a hearing for next week to determine whether double jeopardy protections apply to the case, and she gave the District Attorney’s Office until Friday to file a written response to Dearman’s motion.
In his filing, Dearman pointed to two prior instances in which prosecutors sought and received postponements of the trial. He also cited a ruling issued by Judge Hambright last week that excluded evidence the state had failed to disclose to the defense ahead of trial.
“After the Court’s rulings, the State did not have a single witness that could testify to any connection whatsoever between Defendant and the victims,” Dearman wrote in the filing. “Not a single human being could testify that Haratio Stewart ever knew or met the victims. Not a single human being could testify that Haratio Stewart was at the crime scene.”
Dearman argued that allowing prosecutors to dismiss the case now and reinstate it later would effectively let the state sidestep the consequences of the judge’s evidentiary rulings. “[This] would merely be side stepping the Court’s sanctions,” he wrote, adding that his client’s rights have been violated by the prolonged proceedings.
“The Defendant lost three years of his life being charged with murder,” Dearman wrote. “He served at least one year in jail and the remaining on home arrest.”
The picture Dearman’s filing paints is of a state whose case weakened as the trial approached. When a judge excludes evidence because prosecutors failed to turn it over to the defense before trial, the state is left to prove its case with what remains — and by the defense’s account, what remained here was insufficient to connect Stewart to the victims or the scene. Dismissal with the option to reinstate would, in effect, give prosecutors time to repair a case that their own disclosure failures damaged.
Exclusion of evidence is one of the strongest sanctions a trial judge can impose short of throwing a case out entirely. Courts use it because warnings and pressure from the bench often fail to cure a pattern of late or missing discovery, and because the defendant’s ability to prepare a defense cannot be restored after the fact. The remedy is meant to hurt — precisely so that prosecutors’ offices treat pretrial disclosure obligations as non-negotiable.
What double jeopardy actually protects
The dispute now centers on a constitutional question: whether reinstating the murder charge against Stewart at a later date would violate protections against double jeopardy, which generally bar prosecutors from bringing a defendant to trial twice for the same offense once jeopardy has attached.
The threshold question in cases like this one is when jeopardy “attaches.” In Alabama, as in most American jurisdictions, jeopardy attaches in a jury trial when the jury is sworn, and in a bench trial when the first witness is sworn. Because Stewart’s trial had not begun — he had not yet faced a sworn jury — the state’s position will almost certainly be that jeopardy never attached at all, and that a dismissal before trial leaves the state free to refile the same charge later.
Dearman’s argument rests on the other side of that line. His filing frames the dismissal-with-reinstatement arrangement as a device for dodging the court’s sanctions, and he points to the three years of pretrial restraint Stewart has already endured — a year in the county jail, then home arrest — as the practical burden that double jeopardy principles are meant to prevent the state from imposing twice. Whether that argument carries the day in a case where trial never commenced is the question the hearing next week will test.
Judges in Alabama do have discretion over whether to grant a dismissal with or without prejudice, and the choice matters enormously. A dismissal with prejudice closes the case for good. A dismissal without prejudice — the form granted here — leaves the charge technically alive, subject to the prosecutor’s option to bring it back. Defense lawyers routinely object to the arrangement when the dismissal follows a setback for the state, as it did here.
What happens next
Judge Hambright’s scheduled hearing next week is expected to address that question directly, after weighing the District Attorney’s Office written response, due Friday, against Dearman’s objections. The outcome will determine whether Stewart’s case can move forward again in the future or whether the dismissal effectively closes the matter.
If the judge allows the charge to be reinstated, the case would return to the same docket that produced it — pending nearly three years, twice postponed, with an evidentiary ruling against the state still on the record. If she instead holds that double jeopardy bars a refiling, the Christmas Eve shooting case would end without a trial, and the questions about what happened at the Maison De Ville apartments would remain unanswered in any courtroom.
Neither the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office nor Judge Hambright has indicated how the evidentiary issues cited in the request for dismissal might be resolved should the case be allowed to proceed again. The written response due Friday is expected to lay out the state’s legal position for the first time; to date, the office’s explanation has been limited to the phrase “evidentiary issues” used in the request for dismissal.
For the Nettles and Smith families, the hearing adds another chapter to a case that has already stretched across three Christmas seasons. For Stewart, who spent a year in jail and more than two on home arrest for a charge the state now says it cannot presently prove, the next week’s arguments will decide whether the end of this trial date is the beginning of another one — or the end of the road.
The wider stakes for the local docket
Cases of this kind are watched closely across the local defense bar and the District Attorney’s Office alike, because the ruling will set a precedent for how similar dismissals are handled in Mobile County going forward. Prosecutors occasionally ask for dismissals without prejudice when a case needs more time — when a key witness cannot be located, when lab work is outstanding, or when evidentiary rulings have narrowed the proof. Every one of those requests now carries the knowledge that a judge in this circuit has been asked to decide whether such a dismissal can ride past the objections of a defense that has already borne years of pretrial restraint.
The hearing also lands at a moment of heightened attention to disclosure practices in criminal cases. Courts across Alabama have grown increasingly willing to police the timing of discovery, and defense attorneys routinely file motions to exclude late-arriving evidence on the theory that a defense built for a trial date cannot simply be rebuilt in the days before jury selection. When a judge agrees and excludes the undisclosed material, the state must live with the result — and the question of whether it may instead start over is exactly the one now before the court.
For Stewart, the practical arithmetic is stark. He has already served a year in jail and lived under home arrest for the remainder of nearly three years, restrictions imposed on the strength of a case the state itself now acknowledges it cannot presently take to a jury. If the charge is reinstated, those years count for nothing in the legal sense, though they may weigh on any eventual sentencing discussion. If it is not, he walks away from the courthouse with the presumption of innocence restored and no further proceedings on the Christmas Eve shooting.
Whichever way Judge Hambright rules, the decision will be measured against the facts on her own record: two granted postponements, an exclusion sanction issued days before trial, and a defense filing that quotes the state’s position back to it. The hearing next week will be the first public airing of both sides’ answers, and the written response due Friday will show whether the District Attorney’s Office offers more than the “evidentiary issues” phrase that started the dispute.
