DETROIT – The man accused of killing a Detroit teen who went missing in January 2024 appeared in court on Monday.
Jarvis Butts, who was charged with sexually assaulting and murdering 13-year-old Na’Ziyah Harris, has also been charged in other sexual assault cases.
He was in court on Monday, Aug. 4, 2025, for a pretrial hearing. During the hearing, the judge heard about discovery issues related to cellphone data files in the homicide case, along with arguments regarding motions to quash filed by the defense over first-degree criminal sexual conduct charges in the unrelated sexual assault cases.
You can watch the full hearing in the video at the top of this article.
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Motions to quash
The defense filed two motions to quash related to first-degree criminal sexual conduct charges in Butts’ other cases, claiming that there was abuse of discretion.
The defense said that one witness, who was 4 years old at the time of the assault and is now 13, didn’t testify that any penetration had occurred, but rather said “he touched her where she pees.”
Similar to this case, the defense said a witness in another case testified that Butts had touched her, but didn’t testify that penetration had occurred. The defense claimed that the witness could have said Butts had touched her “on the inside” but didn’t.
Due to this, the defense filed motions to quash, claiming there was an abuse of discretion in filing first-degree criminal sexual conduct charges.
The prosecution discussed what both witnesses said during their testimony, and said any type of intrusion is classified as penetration.
After hearing the arguments and reviewing the testimony, the judge ruled that there was no abuse of discretion and denied the motions to quash.
Discovery issues related to cellphone data
In addition to those motions, discovery issues in connection with his murder case were also discussed during the hearing.
The defense said that they have been trying to get underlying data from cellphones examined in the case since February, and still haven’t received it.
The prosecution said that the request for underlying files was unusual, so he had to communicate with a cellphone expert at the Detroit Police Department to determine what exactly they were asking for.
Once that happened, the defense provided a hard drive to put the files on, and the prosecution took it to the Detroit Police Department under the understanding that the detective on the case and the cellphone expert would upload the files.
There was a miscommunication between the two, and both had thought the other uploaded the files, but neither did, and when the prosecution went to pick the hard drive up, it still hadn’t been done.
The prosecution explained that the files are taken from a Blu-ray disc and put onto a computer, and then transferred to the hard drive, and that it was expected to take some time since they needed to get data from around 15 phones.
The cellphone expert told the prosecution that the data transfer would be done by Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025.
Next court dates
Due to this, and an “other act notice” filed by the prosecution, the judge set another pretrial conference date for Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025.
Butts’ trial is scheduled to start in October.