 Appalachian Wireless now has new forward pay pricing where you can pay up front and get the data and features you design. 5GB of data, just $39.99, unlimited, just $79.99. Better service, bigger savings, that's today's Appalachian Wireless. John Russell Hall's criminal record extends back to at least the mid-1990s and includes two felony convictions and a handful of misdemeanor convictions. His record also includes the dismissal of several other cases and all total Hall's record includes relatively little jail time. Many have expressed outrage that Hall's criminal record has not been handled more harshly, but Pike County Attorney Howard Keith Hall told me this week that even considering John Hall's prior criminal offenses, there was no way to predict that he would eventually kill a police officer. According to the booking log at the Pike County Detention Center, John Russell Hall, the man accused of murdering Pikeville police officer Scotty Hamilton, has been booked into the jail 19 times since 1995. But that does not mean Hall has 19 criminal cases in his court file. According to court documents since 1995, Hall has been arrested seven times on misdemeanor charges. Two of those charges involved assault allegations stemming from private complaints. Pike County Attorney Howard Keith Hall said this week that those complaints were resolved to the complainant's satisfaction, including one dismissal at the request of the complainant. When checking into those, those were private citizen complaints taken out by private citizens. No police officer filed those charges. Those charges are the type of charges that are usually worked out in court. Both those, the complaining witness or the person that brought the charges, showed up. One of them wasn't even served till seven months. That's the one on the ex-wife, or the current the wife, I guess I should say. They were back together. That weren't even served until eight months after the charges were taken. She didn't think to come down and ask to drop the charges. The warrant will serve later. And those charges were ultimately dismissed in open court, and there's a video. I've replayed even the video of the court proceedings. She showed up in open court and asked the judge to drop the charges. Of the other misdemeanor charges, they include two alcohol intoxication arrests. Two DUI arrests, and a marijuana cultivation case in 1995 in which John Russell Hall was convicted. All but six of Hall's other arrests were for either probation or parole violation, failure to appear in court or failure to pay fines, or contempt of court charges. No information was available on three arrests, and the final three were felony charges that were prosecuted in circuit court, or as in the case of Hamilton's murder, are currently in circuit court. County Attorney Howard Keith Hall said the charges John Hall had already faced in district court do not and did not warrant long jail or prison sentences. But those cases were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. My office as a county attorney only prosecutes misdemeanor and small violations. The cases that John Hall had for us 15, 25 years ago were not drug trafficking charges. They weren't charges involving any type of felonies. The cases my office has are merely misdemeanors. Maximum jail time my office can prosecute would be one year in jail. And it's been almost 10 years since he's even been here. So far as my office is concerned, there's no way he could have been held in jail on anything that we had as a misdemeanor. The county attorney added however that if he could have predicted where John Hall's alleged criminal activity would lead, he would have done everything in his power to stop him. How you can predict someone that gets drunk in public, treat them like a cop killer. I don't know. But if anybody knows how we should change the way we do things, let us know. Come look at the file with me. I've heard 19 charges. We found nine, seven small district court cases that I prosecuted, two more serious cases that Rick Barley prosecuted in the last eight years. John Russell Hall was indicted this week in Hamilton's murder. In that case, as with most felony cases, will now be handled in Pike Circuit Court by the office of Pike Commonwealth's attorney, Rick Barley. In Pikeville, Chris Anderson, EKB News.