A Mobile County Circuit Court case took an unusual turn this month when a man facing a terrorist threat charge asked the court to pay thousands of dollars for a specialized therapy program, arguing the sessions would help prove his innocence. Chase Anderson Romagnano, 29, filed a five-page motion asking the court to cover $25,000 in costs for the therapy, which he said would include work with a licensed sexual surrogate. The filing immediately stood out in a courthouse where defense motions more commonly request continuances, expert witnesses or funds for private investigators.
In the filing, Romagnano acknowledged the request was unusual, writing that he was “beyond embarrassed” it had come to this point. According to the motion, Romagnano believes that participating in the sessions and sharing details of them with the court would demonstrate that prosecutors do not have a valid case against him and that the proceedings have wasted the court’s time. He did not lay out in detail how the therapy sessions would establish his innocence, but described them in the filing as central to refuting the state’s allegations.
The request put Circuit Court Judge Robert Smith, who is overseeing the case, in unfamiliar territory. Judges routinely rule on motions involving evidence, scheduling and defense funding, but a motion asking the public to underwrite intimate therapy sessions as an innocence strategy has few, if any, precedents in the local docket. Smith had not ruled on the therapy-funding motion as of this month, and no hearing date on the request had been publicly announced.
Romagnano was indicted in 2013 in Mobile County Circuit Court on a single count connected to threatening phone calls and emails prosecutors say were directed at staff members of Spring Hill College in Mobile. The case has remained active in the local court system since that time, moving through the sort of long, slow procedure that is common in felony prosecutions where motions, scheduling conflicts and changes in representation stretch the timeline well beyond the original indictment.
A Charge That Carries Serious Weight
Terrorist threat cases are uncommon in Alabama state courts, but the charge itself is a serious felony. Under Alabama law, a person commits the crime of making a terrorist threat when he or she threatens to commit a crime of violence with the purpose of terrorizing another person, causing evacuation of a building or other serious public inconvenience. A conviction can carry a prison sentence measured in years, along with fines, which is part of why defendants in such cases typically fight the allegations aggressively through every available procedural channel.
Spring Hill College, a private institution founded in 1830 in Mobile’s Spring Hill neighborhood, is the oldest college in Alabama and a familiar landmark in the city’s western suburbs. Campuses of its size take reported threats seriously, and threat reports at colleges typically trigger coordination between campus security and local law enforcement before a case ever reaches a grand jury. The college has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the matter, and the case turns entirely on the alleged conduct of the defendant.
Why the Funding Motion Matters
At the heart of the dispute is a question that courts deal with constantly, though rarely in this form: who pays for a criminal defense? Alabama, like every state, is required to provide counsel to defendants who cannot afford an attorney, and trial judges have authority to approve public funds for defense expenses such as investigators, expert witnesses and transcripts when the defense shows they are reasonably necessary. Those requests are usually measured against established categories of need. Therapy of the kind Romagnano described does not fit neatly into any of them, which is likely to be a central issue if the motion is argued.
Defense motions for public funds must generally show both that the defendant is financially unable to pay and that the expense bears a direct relationship to preparing the defense. Courts have approved money for DNA experts, mental health evaluations, accident reconstructionists and similar specialists because their work can genuinely affect the truth-finding function of a trial. Romagnano’s motion, by contrast, argues that the therapy itself would function as a form of proof, a theory that prosecutors and court observers alike have found hard to follow.
Prosecutors, for their part, were dismissive of the request. Chief Assistant District Attorney Deborah Tillman told reporters the office considers the motion frivolous, noting it has no bearing on the underlying terrorist threat charge and declining further comment. The district attorney’s office, which handles thousands of felony cases a year across Mobile County, rarely comments on pending litigation at all, making the public dismissal of the motion a measure of how strongly the state views the request.
The case has also seen turnover on the defense side. Romagnano’s attorney, Jeff Deen, filed a separate motion asking to withdraw from representing him after Romagnano indicated he no longer wanted Deen as his counsel. Deen said he read the sex-therapy motion after it was filed but declined to comment on its contents, noting that Romagnano appeared to be representing himself going forward. Judge Smith had not ruled on the withdrawal motion either.
That combination — a defendant steering his own defense while asking the court to fund an unconventional program — creates a complicated procedural picture. If Smith grants the withdrawal, Romagnano would proceed pro se, representing himself, while the court still holds the discretion to appoint standby counsel to keep the proceedings on track. If the withdrawal is denied, Deen would remain in the case and would be responsible for the strategy chosen, whatever his personal view of the motion. Either way, the funding request would still need a ruling before any sessions could begin.
A Case That Has Stretched Across Years
The long gap between the 2013 indictment and the present is not, by itself, remarkable. Felony dockets in busy urban circuits routinely run for years between indictment and trial, particularly when defendants change attorneys, file serial motions or raise questions about their own competence and representation. Mobile County’s circuit court is one of the busiest in Alabama, and judges there manage crowded criminal dockets alongside a full civil calendar. What is unusual is the nature of the filings that have accumulated as the case has aged.
Defendants who represent themselves are a familiar feature of American courtrooms, and judges go to considerable lengths to make sure they understand the risks. Courts generally warn self-represented defendants that they are held to the same standards as licensed attorneys, that procedural missteps can cost them valuable rights, and that a lawyer would often be better positioned to negotiate or present defenses. In a felony case, the stakes of those warnings are high: the underlying charge remains a serious offense with the possibility of prison time, and no ruling on the therapy motion changes what the state must ultimately prove or disprove at trial.
The motion itself, according to the filing, rests on an unusual chain of logic. Romagnano’s position, as described in court records, is that going through with the therapy and reporting back to the judge would somehow expose the weakness of the prosecution’s case and vindicate his claim that the proceedings have been a waste of the court’s time. The filing does not identify how the sessions would be documented, who would provide them, or what specific conclusions the court would be asked to draw from them, leaving both the judge and prosecutors to speculate about the practical mechanics of the proposal.
Attention Across Mobile’s Legal Community
The unusual filing has drawn attention within Mobile’s legal community, where terrorist threat cases involving local institutions such as Spring Hill College are relatively rare. Attorneys who practice in the George Wallace Criminal Justice Center downtown say unusual motions come across the desk more often than the public realizes, but a request of this kind is the sort that gets passed around and discussed. The case has circulated among defense lawyers and prosecutors as an example of the unpredictable issues that felony courts can be asked to sort out.
What Happens Next in the Case
The immediate question is whether Judge Smith takes up the funding motion, the withdrawal request, or both at the same hearing. Courts often consolidate procedural motions to save time, and the two here are related: whether Romagnano is represented going forward could shape how the funding request is argued, and whether he is determined to be financially unable to pay is a prerequisite for any court-funded defense expense at all. Until those threshold issues are resolved, the substance of the therapy proposal is unlikely to get a full airing.
If the motion is denied, the case would return to its ordinary track, with the underlying terrorist threat charge moving toward trial or plea negotiations on the normal schedule of the circuit’s criminal docket. If it were granted in any form, it would represent a highly unusual use of public defense funds, and prosecutors would almost certainly challenge any attempt to spend the money before sessions began. Either path leaves the core dispute untouched: the state’s allegation that Romagnano made threatening communications to college staff, and his denial that prosecutors can prove it.
For the court, the case is a reminder that felony dockets occasionally produce motions that do not fit any template. Judges in Mobile and across Alabama see a steady stream of routine requests, but the system is built to absorb the unusual ones too, weighing each against the requirements of fairness, public cost and the defendant’s right to present a defense. Smith’s eventual ruling, whatever it says, will have to explain in writing why the request does or does not serve those purposes.
For prosecutors, the episode has been a brief but pointed test of how to respond to filings they consider frivolous without distracting from the case itself. Tillman’s public dismissal was unusually direct for an office that generally lets its court filings speak, and it signaled that the state has no intention of treating the therapy proposal as a serious part of the defense. The underlying charge, the office made clear, will be decided on evidence, not on sessions the defendant proposes to attend at public expense.
For now, the people most affected are the parties themselves. Romagnano remains under indictment more than a decade after the events that led to the charge, his representation unsettled and his signature motion awaiting a ruling. The staff members of Spring Hill College who were the alleged targets of the communications have long since returned to ordinary routines, and the college has had no public role in the litigation beyond the allegations themselves. The residents of Mobile County, whose tax dollars would fund any court-approved defense expense, are left with a case that has become, in the local legal community’s shorthand, the one about the therapy motion.
Both questions before the court — the funding request and the defense withdrawal — are expected to be resolved in coming weeks as the docket allows, though no date certain has been announced. Until then, the case remains pending in Mobile County Circuit Court, a decade-old indictment now accompanied by one of the more unusual motions the courthouse has seen.