YOUNGSTOWN — A jury trial that was abruptly halted Sept. 21 by a mistrial, was again halted Monday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.

Myckle J. Hughes, 23, of Sixth Street in Campbell, faces charges of murder, aggravated murder and aggravated robbery. He is accused of killing recent Chaney graduate Sean Bell, 18, on Oak Street Extension on Aug. 21, 2018. Police initially responded to the scene of a car accident but found Bell’s body with gunshot wounds inside the vehicle.

Judge John Durkin last month declared a mistrial in the case.

After the mistrial, defense attorneys Tom Zena and Doug Taylor filed a motion asking Durkin to dismiss the charges against Hughes “on the grounds that continued prosecution … constitutes a violation of the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Double jeopardy is “placing someone on trial a second time for an offense for which he / she has been previously acquitted,” according to the law.com website.

Durkin filed a judgment entry Thursday stating that the “double jeopardy clause does not prohibit a retrial following a mistrial if taking all the circumstances into consideration, there is manifest necessity for declaring a mistrial.”

But on Friday, the day after the judge filed his entry refusing to dismiss the charges, Zena filed an appeal with the Seventh District Court of Appeals, thereby forcing the trial to be postponed.

A jury was empaneled and sworn Sept. 15, 2020, in the Hughes case, and opening statements and testimony were scheduled to begin Sept. 16.

The judge said the trial had to be postponed at that point because a witness for the prosecution was not available.

Two Mahoning County deputies, Brian Tyree and Bill Horn, escorted the victim’s family out of the courthouse because they were very emotional in the victim / witness room, the judge stated. As the deputies were walking the family members out of the front doors, the jurors were also walking down towards the exits of the courthouse at the same time, the entry states.

“The family proceeded south on Market Street and stopped in front of the courthouse,” Judge Durkin’s entry states. As the jury passed, a family member of the victim made a remark heard by jurors.

The next day, one juror and an alternate juror were dismissed from the panel because each expressed an inability to fairly weigh the evidence based on the incident outside of the courthouse, the entry states. Four other jurors heard the remark, which the judge said he thought had a negative effect on those jurors as well.

Durkin’s ruling states that the incident involving the victim’s family and the jurors was sufficient to warrant a mistrial.

“This court specificially found that the actions that caused the mistrial were not caused or initiated by the actions of either the State of Ohio or the defendant,” the ruling notes.