Criminal Procedure
Lawyer Claims Jury Pool Tainted by ‘Urban Legend’ Blog Posts
Posted Dec 4, 2007, 06:08 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
The lawyer for a man accused of hiding a suspect in the murder of a carjacked couple claims in a motion for a change of venue that blogs helped "outrage and taint any jury pool."
Lawyer Philip Lomonaco of Knoxville, Tenn., claims blogs printed false allegations that the murder victims had been sexually mutilated, the National Law Journal reports. His client, Eric Dewayne Boyd, is accused of hiding the ringleader of a group that kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed the couple, who were out on a date. The suspects are black while the two victims were white.
Lomonaco wrote in his briefs that blogs "spread lies and helped create an urban legend surrounding the details of the final state of the victims' bodies—details meant to outrage and taint any jury pool. These untruths made a heinous crime even more horrific, and has created an irreversible fog of prejudicial publicity."
Stephen Saltzburg, chair of the ABA Criminal Justice Section, told the Daily Business Review that he has never heard of a lawyer seeking a change of venue based in part on blog posts.
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Comments
Posted by Jay - 11 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 9 hours, 17 minutes ago
WARNING: Here is a horrible story the media doesn’t want you to know about; it will make you want to scream. These defendants are disgusting ANIMALS: http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/newsom.asp
Of course, if the media didn’t HIDE this story, perhaps there wouldn’t be any “urban legends.“ Perhaps you’d be able to do a google search and find articles from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, WashPost, etc. But no. At the time, the media was too busy focusing on falsified rape claims by a black stripper against white students (Duke Case).
Interesting that this defense attorney doesn’t state which facts were made up… if any.
Posted by JD - 11 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 9 hours, 14 minutes ago
Here’s one of the few articles explaining the situation: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTZmN2EyYTAxY2YzMGQyMmI5ZDUxODg4OTA5ZDdhZjY=