Person who went into hiding and pretended to die declines to attend court hearing

A man who faked his own death to avoid rape charges and was extradited from Scotland to the United States has refused to appear in court for his latest hearing. Nicholas Rossi, who spent over two years fighting the case, claimed to be an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight. Utah's Fourth District Court Judge Derek Pullan was informed that Rossi would not attend his court appearance via video link from prison on Monday. A new date for his appearance has been scheduled for February 6th. Judge Pullan stated that if Rossi was not genuinely ill, he would authorize the use of reasonable force to compel his attendance. Last Tuesday, the 36-year-old appeared via video link at the Third District Court in Utah. He was arrested in December 2021 in Glasgow under an international arrest warrant after being treated for Covid-19 in a hospital. Rossi argued that he was a victim of mistaken identity and that his actual name was Arthur Knight. However, in November 2022, a sheriff in Edinburgh determined that he was indeed Nicholas Rossi based on matching tattoos and fingerprints. On December 14th of last year, he lost his final extradition appeal. Prosecutors in Utah have charged him with raping a 21-year-old woman in 2008. Rossi was not initially identified as a suspect until a decade later due to a backlog of DNA testing at the state crime lab. During the previous hearing, he denied being Nicholas Rossi and claimed that his name was Arthur Knight Brown.