Posted on 07/13/2006 9:52:10 AM PDT by freespirited
TAVARES, Florida — The judge in the murder trial of a man accused of killing Jessica Lunsford has stopped jury selection because he says an impartial panel can't be found in the area.
John Couey's taped confession and other details of the case have received widespread media coverage. The judge threw out the confession before the trial because investigators ignored Couey's requests to speak to an attorney during questioning.
Attorneys spent three days this week weeding out potential jurors who had been exposed to news reports about the case. Circuit Judge Ric Howard had moved jury selection to Tavares in Lake County because of pervasive publicity in Citrus County, where the alleged crimes occurred and where the nine-year-old girl's body was found.
But the judge decided today that the case has to be moved farther from Citrus County. He has not said from where they will sequester the jury.
Sequester?.......
Now if the judge would like to be done with the whole thing he can simply turn Couey loose ~ just announce beforehand the time and place.
Put him out on the street, justice will be served much more rapidly.
The judge throws out the confession, then excuses the jury pool because the jury pool is familiar with the facts and the existence of the confession. The judge's solution? Draw even greater attention to the existence of a confession by excusing the jury for that reason. The problem is that this scumbag confessed.
This makes me sick.
The Judge probably said, "choose the jury" and the reporter thought that didn't sound important enough.
Do we get a new judge in the process??
Maybe he would let the confession back in :)
Waiting for all charges against him to be dropped...
One of the chilling lines in his confession " I buried her alive in a plastic bag like a pup."
There is nowhere in Florida that they will find a jury that has not formed an opinion of the case. I say move the case to Greenland.
The reporter misused the term here.
And theze peeple went to jurnalizim kollege..................
This is one case I'd like to see tried in IRAN.......
Dig a hole, I have a really big trash bag ready!
I wish someone would acquaint this judge with many of the more high-profile cases that have been tried recently. In the Internet Age, he will not find a jury pool that is pure as the driven snow, as he seems to think can be found.
The newest standards have not been whether a potential juror has *heard* about the case or even whether he/she has formed an opinion about it. Nowadays, they are asking whether they have *followed* the case to any extent (boot that one) or if they have formed an opinion, do they feel they could be able to set that aside and try the case on the merits of the evidence.
Depending on the answers to those questions, the court and the attorneys have done their due diligence. Juries have a way of sorting themselves out once they're in deliberations. I know, not all of them, but the vast majority of them do.
The Enron case here in Houston was a good example of virtually everyone hearing about it and forming an opinion about it. But in deliberations, they were very intent on sticking to the jury instructions from the judge and they each bent over backwards to assign appropriate weight to each point in the very complicated testimony. I was really proud of them.
Wish this judge would get up to speed on this.
Makes me sick, too. Mark Lunsford didn't give media interviews and travel to Wash DC to Congress or to so many state legislatures publicizing Jessica's Law to have his efforts and their widespread results and attention used against him in getting justice for Jessie!
Wow, they showed a few video clips this morning of the potential jurors, just from the neck down, no faces, while on the witness stand, answering attorneys' questions.
It didn't dawn on me until then that they are all people who feel like most of us do - we wouldn't want to be on that jury for all the money in the world (or we *would* but we couldn't be fair).
One woman was just weeping and saying, please don't make me go through this (testimony about the crime itself). Another man was crying silently and wringing his hands, saying he knew there was a confession, he knew the defendant buried her in a trash bag.
It was just agonizing to listen to these people. The voice-over narrative said nearly all 100 were like that - wanted no part of it because of the subject matter. They weren't even capable of putting up a front of fairness just to get on the jury.
My heart goes out to Mark and the Lunsford family. Lord, please help them find a jury, somewhere, somehow. I know it can be done. Jessica deserves it. *sigh*
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