Twenty years after a woman and her 10-year-old stepson were stabbed to death inside their Franklin, Indiana home, the man accused of killing them is asking a judge to throw the case out before it ever reaches trial. Michael James, who was just 14 when Chynna Dickus and her stepson Blake were killed in 2006, is now 35 and facing an indictment he argues was never legally valid in the first place.
Chynna Dickus, 26, and 10-year-old Blake were killed inside their home in the Branigin Woods subdivision on July 24, 2006, during the daytime, according to WTHR. The pair were found murdered by Blake's father, the station reports. James is accused of stabbing both to death, and he was 14 years old at the time of the killings, a detail his attorneys say is central to the dismissal fight now underway in court.
A Legal Fight Over Who Had Authority
James' attorneys argue that in 2006, juvenile court had exclusive jurisdiction over him, and that under the law at the time, a murder allegedly committed by someone under 16 was treated as a juvenile delinquent act rather than an adult crime, per the same WTHR report. They further argue that even that juvenile-court authority expired once James turned 21 in 2012, and that by the time a grand jury took up the case decades later, it had no legal authority to hear it. Taken together, the defense says, those gaps make the indictment itself invalid.
The case sat unsolved for years. By 2015, nearly 500 leads had failed to produce a suspect, according to dailymail.com. Johnson County Prosecutor Lance Hamner has said investigators actually identified James as a suspect well before charges were ever filed. “We had a suspect identified. We weren't able to bring charges for several years because we were trying to get the jurisdictional statute in place,” Hamner said, according to FOX News.
New Law, Old Case
FOX News reports that Indiana lawmakers changed the law in both 2023 and 2025 in an effort to create a path for prosecuting adults for serious crimes they allegedly committed as juveniles. Hamner has said the 2023 version couldn't be applied to James' case after a court interpretation limited its reach, and that the 2025 change finally gave prosecutors the legal mechanism they needed to bring charges against him. Separately, an Indiana Courts case summary in JWB v. State described a similar jurisdictional gap in a different set of cases, involving people accused of child molesting as minors who were never waived into adult court before turning 21 — a parallel legal problem, though not a murder case and not a ruling on James' own challenge.
Accounts of the exact charges against James differ. WTHR's reporting describes the indictment as two counts of murder and two counts of felony murder, while FOX News reports that James faces four counts of murder. James' attorneys have also said that, at the time they filed their request to dismiss, prosecutors had not yet turned over evidence in the case, and a court filing reportedly made no mention of specific evidence.
What Happens Next
James is currently being held in the Brown County Jail. A hearing on the dismissal request has been scheduled for Dec. 10, with his trial currently set to begin Jan. 12, 2027. Whether the judge grants the defense's request to toss the indictment before then remains to be seen.
