The father of the Apalachee school shooting suspect may be facing a jury of peers much closer to home than he’d expected when a judge granted a bid for new venue for his upcoming trial.
The trial of Colin Gray will already be something of a novelty, as it’s just the second time parents of an alleged school shooter have been prosecuted on charges related to their child’s actions.
Barrow County Judge Nicholas Primm agreed to the change of venue requested by both prosecutors and Gray, but the court’s decision on what that would look like didn’t match either legal camp’s request.
The judge decided to import a jury — that is, bring in a jury from outside Barrow County rather than move the entire trial to another locale — but the surprise, legal experts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is that the jury will come from right next door.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Gray’s attorneys had asked that the whole trial be moved down to coastal Georgia, far from any community ties to Apalachee High School. Gray’s son, Colt Gray, is accused of a shooting rampage that killed four people and injured at least nine others in September.
Meanwhile, prosecutors sought an imported jury from Walton County, which sits to the south of Barrow.
Primm instead ruled that jurors would be selected from neighboring Hall County —to the north of Barrow — and then transported to Barrow for the trial.
Neither Gray’s defense attorneys nor the Barrow County district attorney responded to requests for comment.
Hall County may not be far enough away, according to legal experts that spoke to the AJC.
“It does seem very strange that the judge acknowledges that there’s a problem with the venue, with the jury in Barrow County, but thinks that problem is solve by going a few miles over the border,” attorney Travis Griffin, a law firm managing partner who isn’t involved in the Gray case, told the AJC.
Griffin, who lives about 90 miles away in Jones County, said even people around him were impacted by the school shooting.
“I would expect the citizens of Hall County were impacted as much by that shooting as citizens of Barrow County,” he said.
Griffin’s law firm has some experience with importing juries.
They represented Donnie Rowe, charged in the 2017 murders of two corrections officers, in a death penalty trial in Putman County. In the Rowe case, a jury was picked from Grady County and transported about 200 miles north to Eatonton, where they were sequestered in a hotel and heard the case at the Putnam County courthouse.
“They were totally out of the media market. Those people may have heard something vague about it through one or more voluminous media that we have these days but they didn’t have that saturation and so we were able to bring them in and do that,” Griffin said.
Jury consultant Denise de La Rue agreed with Griffin that Primm’s decision doesn’t solve the bias issued raised by both parties in the case.
“I’ve never heard of a change of venue that is literally one county over,” de La Rue said. “I don’t understand the purpose of that.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
In his order, Primm acknowledges that the Hall County Courthouse is only 30 miles away from Apalachee High School and 25 miles away from the Barrow County Courthouse.
Primm does not mention whether the jury will be sequestered for the duration of the expected three-week trial.
De la Rue said picking a jury so close to the incident location means jurors might encounter people who were impacted by the school shooting.
Defense attorney Manny Arora has handled at least one case in which the court imported a jury in Tennessee, where the practice is more common. He said that in Georgia, trials are usually moved to other jurisdictions instead.
Arora said there now seems to be more of a trend to import jurors for logistical purposes.
Arora, who is a former prosecutor, doesn’t think selecting a jury in a different jurisdiction, regardless of how close or far it is, should impact the way the jury is picked.
“To me it makes no difference where they’re coming from and the only difference might be how you use your strike,” Arora said, referring to attorneys’ ability to block a potential juror from hearing the case.
In Tennessee, two trials were held for the Memphis officers charged in the death of Tyre Nichols, one in federal court and one in state court. Attorney Stephen Leffler represented officer Demetrius Haley in both trials.
In the federal case, the judge declined to bring in a jury from outside. However, for the state trial, prosecutors agreed to a change of venue and a jury was imported from more than 300 miles away, in Chattanooga, to Memphis for the trial.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Leffler said the process was smooth and selecting the jury from the other side of the state meant that only a handful of potential jurors had formed opinions on the high-profile case.
However, the distance led many potential jurors to try to get out of serving, Leffler said.
“It was like rats on a sinking ship. Everybody was coming up with all kinds of reasons they couldn’t do it,” he said.
The three officers were acquitted in the state case --the one with the imported jury -- of charges including second-degree murder on May 7. In the federal case, the local jury delivered a mixed verdict that found the officers guilty on some civil rights and witness tampering charges.
Gray’s trial will start September 8. His son, Colt Gray, had also filed a change of venue motion, but at a recent hearing defense attorneys asked for time to conduct a mental evaluation on the shooting suspect. They also sought a plea hearing in October, after his father’s trial concludes.
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