A Sumner man’s child rape case went to the state Supreme Court Thursday, ending in a decision that reversed his previously successful appeal for a mistrial.

Timothy Hager was charged with first-degree rape of a child after the victim volunteered the information to a boyfriend in November 2006.

The victim had written in a letter to her boyfriend that Hager had raped her in 2001, when she was in third grade. After the letter’s discovery by the boyfriend’s stepmother, the case was eventually forwarded through Child Protective Services to Sumner police, who contacted Hager in a van he shared with the victim’s mother. He denied the allegations.

Hager was tried in Pierce County Superior Court, where he was granted a motion before trial that Sumner detectives Tom Callas and Dennis Dorr could not testify that he was evasive during questioning. That trial ended without a verdict and, when the state elected to retry the case, Hager was granted the same motion.

According to the Supreme Court’s record of the trial proceedings, Hager’s attorney argued that while detectives could state the suspect was jittery, shifty and appeared to be under the influence of methamphetamines, it would be improper to state he was evasive.

“You can state the demeanor,” Hager’s attorney said. “You can’t say because of that I think he was deceptive or evasive.  The jury is to make that conclusion.”

Nevertheless, during trial testimony Callas was asked by the prosecutor what Hager’s demeanor was like the day he was contacted, Callas responded “He appeared to be angry. He appeared to be evasive.”

The judge instructed the jury to disregard Callas’s statement and proceed as normal. Hager made a motion for a mistrial, which was denied.

The jury found Hager guilty on the charge of first-degree child rape and he subsequently filed for appeal. The Court of Appeals found that the trial court had abused it’s discretion by denying Hager’s motion for a mistrial.

The state Supreme Court reversed that decision, finding that “the trial court had properly dealt with the violation of (Hager’s motion in limine) by presenting the jury with a curative instruction.”

Eight of the nine Supreme Court justices agreed with the majority opinion, which stated that the capacity of Callas’s comment to cause prejudice in the case was small compared against the actual evidence that Hager was evasive.

Justice Pro Tem Richard Sanders provided the single dissenting opinion, writing that while he agreed the rights set forth in the Sixth Amendment are in place to protect a larger sense of fairness, it did not logically follow that those rights could be violated just because a trial was fair overall.