The trial of a former Aiken County assistant solicitor charged with criminal solicitation of a minor was postponed Monday after Tenth Circuit Judge Alex Macaulay recused himself from hearing the case, at the request of the defendant and his attorneys.

Macaulay had offered to recuse himself if either the defense or prosecutors from the State Attorney General’s Office requested it. The judge said he based the offer on his having knowledge of the case outside the official record.

That move came after Macaulay heard a motion from an attorney for Anthony Clark Odom to dismiss the case on the grounds that the state was pressing a vindictive prosecution.

Attorney Brian McDaniel raised the motion near the end of Monday’s proceedings and before it was formally filed with the Oconee County Clerk of Court’s office. Another defense attorney left the court to file the motion, with five minutes to spare before the 5 p.m. closing.

Megan Wines of the State Attorney General’s Office said she had anticipated the move by the defense but had not been formally notified the motion would be raised.

“The court doesn’t like to be blindsided,” Macaulay said, adding that both sides should have made the possibility known before the jury was selected.

Macaulay had earlier dismissed motions by the lead defense attorney Jim Huff that the state statute as written on criminal solicitation of minors infringed on his client’s right to free speech and equal protection under the law.

Odom was the assistant solicitor for Aiken County from 2002 until 2005. He later entered private practice while also serving as deputy solicitor general for the city of Aiken. He was charged with criminal solicitation of a minor in 2006 by the state attorney general’s Internet predator task force. The charge was based on online conversations he allegedly had with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl but was in fact a Spartanburg County undercover officer.

The trial on the Spartanburg County case ended in a mistrial early in January 2010. State prosecutors said at the time they would retry the case but no retrial date has been set.

The Attorney General’s Office then brought criminal solicitation charges against Odom in Oconee County based on alleged similar online chats during the same period of 2006 with officer Mark Patterson, then with the Westminster Police Department and working with the attorney general’s Internet task force.

Odom was indicted by a state grand jury in Oconee County in May 2010. The jury session was originally slated for Anderson County but was moved to Oconee County to hear the state’s case against Odom.

Macaulay said it was his knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the moving of the jury session that cast doubt on the propriety of his hearing the case.

In making his case for vindictive prosecution by the state, McDaniel called to the witness stand Odom’s chief defense counsel, Jim Huff.

Huff testified that state prosecutors had never given any indication they intended to bring charges against Odom in Oconee County, and then recounted conversations with Megan Wines on April 18, 2010, in which, Huff said, Wines had spitefully declared an intention to bring the Oconee County charges because of her irritation with other matters of the case.

Huff said Wines was irritated that he was pressing to obtain records from a criminal defense attorney who had represented Mark Patterson when Patterson had himself been arrested in Aiken County.

Patterson’s role in the case surfaced during the Spartanburg trial, Huff said, and he was looking at all possible ways that might impeach any testimony Patterson might offer.

“I have an ethical obligation to obtain as much evidence as I can, about the case, about witnesses,” Huff said. “My job is to cast doubt. My impression I got from the state was if we push, they’d push back.”

At the end of their Feb. 18. 2010, exchange, Huff said, Wines declared, “Fine, we’ll just indict … (Odum) in Oconee, then.”

Huff said he also thought then-State Attorney General Henry McMaster had crossed a clear ethical boundary by giving an interview in May 2010.

“We believe he did it in Oconee, and we will try him in Oconee,” McMaster said at the time. “We don’t charge somebody unless we know that they’re guilty, and we know we have the evidence to prove they’re guilty this case is one that needs to be charged and tried.”

“I was speechless when I heard what he said,” Huff testified. He cited a portion of the code of ethics proscribing what Huff described as “throwing prejudice to the winds” in the media, citing another portion that held prosecutors to a special duty in that regard.

Wines denied that she had ever said the state would not prosecute Odom in Oconee County.

She acknowledged that she had questioned the relevance of Patterson’s criminal records, but said the Oconee County charges represented a legitimate tactic by the Attorney General’s Office.

“It was a change of strategy,” she said. “Since I believe a separate crime had been committed, we would charge here.”

The case has been continued awaiting a new trial date before a different judge.

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