Fourth Judicial District Judge John Larson based his decision in part on Missoula citizens' responses to recent questionnaires, which polled 250 prospective jurors about their exposure to news coverage of the gruesome murder, in which 56-year-old Forrest Clayton Salcido was stomped to death.
Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg proposed selecting jurors from another county and then moving the panel to Missoula for trial. However, that idea was panned in favor of a new venue, with Anthony St. Dennis, 18, slated to stand trial Sept. 26 in Great Falls before 8th Judicial District Judge Thomas M. McKittrick, and 20-year-old Dustin Strahan scheduled for trial Nov. 17 in Helena before 1st Judicial District Judge Jeffrey M. Sherlock.
The motion for a change of venue was denied early this summer, but defense lawyers raised the issue again at an Aug. 14 pretrial conference for St. Dennis, who along with Strahan, allegedly beat Salcido to death near the California Street footbridge last December. Both men face charges of deliberate homicide.
At the August hearing, Van Valkenburg, lead prosecutor in the St. Dennis case, conceded with the defense, telling Larson that, based on the prospective jurors' responses to the questionnaires, it would be appropriate to draw a jury panel from a community other than Missoula County, where there is less exposure to the local media market.
“There are so many people who have absolute opinions about the guilt of the defendant,” Van Valkenburg said at the hearing.
What makes the move even more unusual is that, unlike in St. Dennis' case, attorneys for Strahan never filed a motion for a change of venue, or argued the point in court.
Andrew King-Ries, a professor at the University of Montana School of Law, said the standard lawyers must meet for a trial to be moved is rigorous, with defense counsel faced with the burden to prove that a panel of impartial, indifferent jurors cannot possibly be obtained. Lawyers pursuing a change of venue commonly employ community surveys, media samples and expert witnesses to prove their case in point, and still fail to sway a judge.
Although the standard in St. Dennis' case was clearly blunted when Van Valkenburg recently conceded to public defenders Chris Daly and Paulette Ferguson, dozens of cases with far more extensive news coverage have been denied changes of venue, King-Ries said.
In 2005, defense lawyers for W.R. Grace & Co. argued that the high-profile environmental crimes trial should be moved to another state, arguing that six years of inflammatory press coverage prejudiced the jury pool in all of Montana.
At a change-of-venue hearing in 2005, the defense illustrated its point by drawing testimony from a nationally recognized social scientist and trial consultant, Edward J. Bronson. Bronson, whose specialty is changes of venue, has taken the hot seat in such high-profile criminal trials as that of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, murderer Scott Peterson, and Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
“This is close to the top of having the most prejudicial impact of pretrial publicity that I've ever come across,” Bronson said of the Grace case. “This case was extraordinarily prejudiced.”
In his order of denial, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy wrote that, despite the expert analysis, he was confident that an unbiased jury could be impaneled through the voir dire process, a method of jury selection where an attorney can directly challenge a prospective juror who expresses bias against the case.
Van Valkenburg says the last time he witnessed a judge grant a change of venue was almost 10 years ago, when Missoula Police Sgt. Bob Heinle was shot and paralyzed.
Missoula District Judge Robert L. “Dusty” Deschamps III, a former Missoula county attorney, said he only remembered one instance in nearly 30 years where a trial was moved.
“During my tenure as Missoula County attorney, and I was there for 28 years, the only change of venue I had was Van Dyken,” Deschamps said, referring to Fred Van Dyken, who shot and killed Missoula County Sheriff's Sgt. Allen Kimery in 1984 over a stolen tank of gasoline.
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