Pasco defendant is no figure of sympathy, but his case has some interesting twists

This is not a claim that Stephen Miholics is a nice guy. For one thing, he was previously sentenced to prison for child abuse.

He came home drunk on the night of Oct. 16, 2007. He punched out a window, kicked the door. His family called the Pasco County Sheriff's Office.

Miholics greeted the deputies wielding a butter knife and a metal spatula. This did not go well for him. He ended up getting shot in the chest. The shooting was later ruled to be justified.

Miholics lived, and was convicted of two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer with a deadly weapon. Given Miholics' record, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Why shouldn't the story end there? Only because of a couple of interesting twists.

The first twist is that soon after Miholics was charged, the state announced that the principal witness — the deputy who shot him — would not attend the trial.

That deputy, Joe Ardolino, was going to Afghanistan. He had taken a contract with the U.S. Department of State to be a private police liaison officer, the state's motion said.

So prosecutors filed a motion to "perpetuate" Ardolino's testimony, to let him testify in advance. The judge, William R. Webb, agreed over the objections of Miholics' public defender, who had been given short notice.

Here Miholics made yet another bad decision. He fired his lawyer. When the judge understandably refused him a delay to hire another one, Miholics decided he would represent himself.

The judge allowed this, although it was a highly technical phase of the case. Miholics was utterly helpless in opposing the state's motion to perpetuate the deputy's testimony, and he was unable to lay the proper legal groundwork to question the deputy's track record or whether the deputy had overreacted.

Yet the deputy's record might have been relevant. Ardolino was the deputy who made news in 2003 for a chasing a traffic violator through the Lacoochee area of Pasco County until the driver crashed into a palm tree and died. The resulting racial tension contributed, a month later, to the mistaken-revenge murder of Sheriff's Lt. Bo Harrison.

On appeal, Miholics' new lawyer raised the issues both of allowing the deputy's testimony and whether Miholics could have been legally convicted of a "deadly weapon" assault in the first place.

State law had been changed in 2006 to exempt a "blunt-bladed table knife" from the definition of a weapon. For Miholics, this could have meant the difference between a year in jail and 15 years in prison. The state's reply in its brief was technical: True or not, Miholics' trial lawyer had failed to "preserve" that issue properly for appeal.

So the letter of the law was satisfied. A few weeks ago, on Sept. 16, the 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld Miholics' conviction routinely without a written opinion.

Miholics' appellate lawyer, John Klawikofsky, is a former 15-year assistant attorney general who told me he is troubled by the case. He will pursue a claim of ineffective assistance by the trial lawyer, and maybe go to federal court after that.

This man Miholics has struck out in every way — his record, his choice to wield a knife and spatula as he met the Pasco deputies, his decision to fire his lawyer at a crucial juncture. I do not think many people will feel sympathy for him. And yet, as I said, these twists are worth noting.