North Central District Court Judge Richard Hagar has denied the motion to dismiss filed by the attorney’s of Nichole Erin Rice, 36, Minot, setting the course for the jury trial on the charge she killed her then roommate Anita Knutson, 18, in 2007.

The trial was scheduled for July after a hearing at the end of September, which also included the filing of a motion to dismiss by Rice’s attorneys on the grounds that false information was entered in testimony at the preliminary hearing in 2022.

Hagar ultimately ruled against dismissing the charge, due to the lower probable cause and “a minimal burden of proof” required at preliminary hearings. Though he said that it was “uncontested” that former Minot Police Detective Mikali Talbott’s testimony was made in “error,” Hagar found that she had not done so in “an intentional or a reckless manner.”

Hagar’s ruling comes after two months of back and forth filings and a hearing introducing testimony from DNA experts which established that Talbott had incorrectly stated Rice’s DNA could not be excluded from a sample collected from the murder weapon.

Hagar agreed with the state’s argument that Talbott had testified for an hour and a half at the preliminary hearing, which included over an hour of cross examination by defense attorney Philip Becher. Hagar noted that Becher never brought up the 2016 DNA report during his cross examination of Talbott despite having knowledge of what it entailed at the time.

Hagar concluded saying that Talbott’s DNA testimony was “but one piece of the probable cause puzzle,” and that she had testified to a wide range of evidence in the case file that otherwise has not been established as erroneous or contested by Rice’s attorneys since the preliminary hearing. Rice’s attorney’s had described the state’s remaining evidence as “petty gossip and speculation,” in their motion to dismiss and argued that moving forward would set a “dangerous precedent,” for future murder cases.

Rice’s trial is scheduled to begin on July 15 to run through Aug. 2.