Attorney in Tifton murder case asks for change of venue

<p>The attorney for one of four people accused of murdering six Mexican immigrants has asked the judge to move the trial away from the Tift County area because extensive publicity has made it impossible to seat an impartial jury there.</p><p>The motion, which also alleges "dissemination of extremely prejudicial and false and misleading material" by authorities, was submitted May 7 but wasn't unsealed until earlier this month.</p><p>It was served on the district attorney on June 1, the day Superior Court Judge Gary McCorvey closed all pretrial hearings and all motions to the press. More than 40 motions filed by Jamie Underwood's attorney Dennis Francis were unsealed earlier this month, after news organizations asked the judge to reconsider.</p><p>In the venue change motion, Francis said media accounts, word-of-mouth publicity and "untruths and misleading information" spread by "law enforcement agents" made moving the trial necessary.</p><p>Francis made a different argument at a June 25 hearing, when he said moving the trial wouldn't help because of pervasive statewide media coverage. He didn't mention then that he had already filed the motion for a venue change.</p><p>The June 25 hearing concerned motions by The Associated Press, The Tifton Gazette and the Moultrie Observer asking the judge to open the hearings. Francis said the press and the public should be kept out.</p><p>"I don't think you can escape the media coverage of this case," Francis said at the time.</p><p>Defending his order to close the hearings, the judge said it was possible no county would provide a jury that wasn't already prejudiced by what he had called "the infotainment industry." He had not yet ruled on the change of venue motion by noon Friday.</p><p>In another motion, the defense sought to bar the prosecution from seeking the death penalty. The motion said the district attorney in the Tifton Judicial Circuit seeks death based on "the amount of publicity a case received, which politicians call or hold press conferences, (and) whether or not the Chief of Police makes public pronouncements about the death penalty ..."</p><p>Another motion seeks to keep the jury from seeing the victims' friends and family in the courthouse. Francis argued that the small, south Georgia courthouse is built in a way that jurors would pass by anybody attending the hearing on their way in or out.</p><p>"The situation may cause the jurors to feel sympathy for the victim's family in the event they should see some of the family crying or upset," Francis wrote, arguing that the jury not be taken out when they might run into victims' families or witnesses.</p><p>Finally, the defense filed a motion to make sure minority jurors would be seated, asking the judge to prevent the prosecution from making peremptory challenges "in a racially discriminatory fashion."</p><p>Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Underwood and Stacey Bernard Sims, both of whom are black. The men face multiple charges, including murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery, burglary and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime in the deaths of six men and the injury of at least six others targeted in at least four attacks on Sept. 30, 2005, in and around Tifton, a rural town about 170 miles south of Atlanta.</p><p>Two women, Jennifer Lafay Wilson and Emma Jean Powell, were indicted on the same charges, but prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty against them.</p><p>The brutality of the attacks _ with the victims beaten with a baseball bat, shot and, in at least one case, raped _ shocked many of the thousands of Hispanic immigrants who have flocked to south Georgia for jobs in the farms and manufacturing. Since the attacks, community leaders have been trying to build better relationships between immigrants and longtime residents, and police have been reaching out to Hispanic neighborhoods.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2007/7/93740