A District of Columbia man who never stood trial on charges of killing a father and his 9-year-old daughter and raping two women in Montgomery County in 2002 will now stand trial after a new psychological evaluation found him mentally fit.
After spending more than four years in a mental hospital, Anthony Kelly, 43, was declared fit for trial in December and last week told Montgomery County Circuit Judge Durke Thompson that he wanted to proceed without an attorney, which Thompson allowed.
Kelly said he didn’t feel the public defenders assigned to his case had been honest with him, and he disagreed with their belief that he wasn’t competent for trial. He was declared mentally ill and incompetent to stand trial by state psychiatrists in 2004.
Thompson strongly recommended that Kelly maintain his legal counsel, but Kelly said he was prepared to go it alone, citing his experience helping other inmates with their appeals during more than 10 years in and out of the prison system.
In 1996, Kelly was sentenced to 10 years and six months after being convicted on car theft charges, among others. He was released in 2001.
He was placed behind bars again in 2002 after being charged with two counts of first-degree murder for allegedly shooting to death George Russell, 47, and his daughter, Erika Smith. He also faces rape charges stemming from an attack on a61-year-old Silver Spring woman and a 20-year-old Gaithersburg woman, among a slew of other charges including robbery and theft.
Russell and his daughter were killed in their Silver Spring home, and the women were raped while waking alone — the 20-year-old in Wheaton while walking to catch a bus, and the 61-year-old on the way home from a nearby relative’s house in Silver Spring.
While at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, Kelly often refused to take his medication, and in a precedent-setting Court of Appeals case, it was ruled that officials couldn’t force him to take the medicine.
Kelly faces four consecutive life sentences, two of those without parole.
