POCATELLO — Although Sixth District Judge David Nye  did set bond in one of the cases against Douglas F. Hartman — something he declined to do during the summer — it wasn’t the reduction to $5,000 that the defendant was seeking.

Hartman was arrested in June and charged with four felony counts of possession of a controlled substance. He was also charged with an enhancement alleging it is a second or subsequent drug offense. Bond in that case was set at $22,500.

But at the time of his arrest, Hartman was on probation for a 2011 conviction on two counts of felony injury to a child. Originally charged with two counts rape, those charges were reduced as part of a plea agreement.

In that case, Hartman was sentenced to three years fixed and three years indeterminate on each count. Both were suspended and Hartman was diverted to a retained jurisdiction program, one that seeks to address what is believed to be the underlying cause of the criminal behavior.

Nye sent Hartman on the rider in July of 2011, telling the defendant at the time that he didn’t want to see him go to prison, given the circumstances surrounding those charges, but believed that was the direction he would be headed if placed on probation without the tools to be successful.

“You go up there and prove to me that you can follow the rules and we will talk about probation when you get back,” Nye told Hartman at the time.

When Hartman returned from successful completion of the program in December of last year, Nye did just that, placing him on six years probation.

With the new charges in June, however, Hartman is in violation of that probation and in July, Nye denied Hartman bond in that case.

But on Tuesday, Hartman was back in front of Nye with his attorney, Kent Reynolds, of the public defender’s office, who was arguing for a bond reduction to $5,000. Reynolds explained that there was potential his clients could make that $5,000 bond and if he wasn’t able to, it would at least allow him to work as a trustee in the Bannock County Jail.

Deputy Prosecutor Ryan Godfrey said the state did not want to see a bond reduction and felt that bond in the amount of $50,000 was warranted.

That’s pretty much what Nye did, keeping the $22,500 bond on the new case in place and setting bond on the 2011 conviction at $25,000. Nye said of significant concern for him was that one of the probation violations alleged against Hartman was that he fled to Oregon.