photo by: Sara Shepherd

Steven A. Drake III appears in Douglas County District Court during a hearing on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019.

A Lawrence man accused of murder now has a “hard deadline” to find a new attorney before he faces trial in the long-delayed case.

Steven A. Drake III, 22, is close to hiring a private attorney to take over the case in which he is charged with first-degree premeditated murder, said Carol Cline, his court-appointed attorney. But Judge Kay Huff said she would not allow any more delays and scheduled a seven-day trial in Douglas County District Court, beginning May 4, 2020.

Although Drake is still working to hire a private attorney, Huff said she also would not allow a new attorney to move the date of the trial once that attorney took over.

“(The attorney) needs to know this,” Huff told Drake. “This is a hard deadline.”

Drake’s new trial date is just over two and a half years since the shooting that happened on Sept. 19, 2017, in the doorway of Drake’s home in the 2000 block of West 27th Terrace. Bryce S. Holladay, 26, of Lawrence, was killed in the shooting.

Drake’s trial has been delayed several times in the last 18 months. Most recently, Huff said she granted a 90-day continuance to Drake to allow him and his family the opportunity to search for a private attorney after his former court-appointed attorney, Angela Keck, asked in August to be removed from the case because of a conflict of interest.

Keck previously said that she had planned to argue that Drake was not guilty of first-degree premeditated murder as charged because he acted in defense of himself or others. He previously tried to get the charges dismissed altogether, arguing that he acted lawfully under Kansas’ “stand your ground” law, but the judge denied that request.

According to Drake and three other people at the house with him, Holladay was taking items from the home and refused to leave, even after the four of them tried to physically force him out the door.

Witnesses testified at a preliminary hearing that Holladay was trying to punch them and force his way inside the house when Drake retrieved a handgun from a bedroom and shot him in the face at close range.

Drake has another pending case in which he is charged with vehicular homicide in connection with a deadly crash on Nov. 6, 2016, just north of Clinton Lake. Taylor B. Lister, 24, of Lecompton, was killed in the crash.