BISMARCK, N.D.—A Fargo man sentenced to life for murdering an 11-year-old girl has no grounds to seek release from a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado, North Dakota prosecutors say.
Kyle Bell was convicted in 1999 of killing Jeanna North, whose family lived in his Fargo neighborhood. Bell is asking U.S. District Judge Dan Hovland to release him from prison, saying his rights are being violated.
Bell, 40, argues in handwritten court documents that as a state prisoner, he is being illegally confined in a federal facility where he cannot visit with family members and friends and where he is unable to work and earn money as other state prisoners can.
“I have been placed in a more confined, harsher environment, increasing my punishment,” Bell wrote.
In response, North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem cited Bell’s escape from a prison transport bus in 1999. He also said Bell had asked the North Dakota Penitentiary warden for protection from other inmates while he was housed there in the mid-1990s for unrelated child molestation crimes.
Stenehjem said in court documents filed this week that Bell was not transferred to Colorado “for retaliatory reasons,” but that the transfer was rational and proper.
Bell was sent to the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo., after an escape from a private prisoner transport bus in October 1999. The bus had stopped for fuel in New Mexico on its way to Oregon.
He was on the lam for three months but was recaptured in Dallas in January 2000, after his case was featured on the “America’s Most Wanted” TV show.
Bell has unsuccessfully tried earlier to appeal his conviction. The North Dakota Supreme Court dismissed an appeal in March 2000 because Bell was a fugitive when the justices were to hear the case.
Bell says that dismissal violated his rights, an argument Stenehjem rejects.
“The fugitive dismissal rule is a well-established and recognized rule … as far back as 1897,” the attorney general said.
Bell, in his court filings, appears frustrated, saying he has limited access to law books. “I am not an attorney and really do not know what I am doing,” he wrote.
Bell had asked for a court-appointed lawyer in February, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles Miller ruled he was not entitled to legal help.
Bell is eligible for parole on his life sentence after 30 years, but that sentence does not begin until he finishes serving 30 years on the 1995 child molestation sentence.
