Retrial for Ray Buckey on 8 Counts Set Today

Nearly seven years since his arrest--and three months after being acquitted of most of the charges against him--McMartin Pre-School defendant Ray Buckey goes on trial today on eight unresolved counts of child molestation.

About 400 jurors will be queried to find a panel of 12, and alternates, who can serve for an estimated six months and who have not formed--in the wake of massive nationwide publicity--rigid views about the guilt or innocence of the 31-year-old former nursery school teacher.

Selecting a jury will not be easy, both sides agree, but the large pool from which jurors are drawn in Los Angeles County makes a fair trial as likely here as anywhere.

“The ideal would be to find 12 truly unbiased people,” said Pasadena trial consultant Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, who advised the defense during Buckey’s first trial. “But in light of the international nature of the case, unless they’ve been living in a cave, it will be difficult to find anyone without some kind of bias,” even if the trial were moved, or jurors were brought in from another district.

The challenge will be “to see to what extent it (bias) is and if they can put aside those feelings,” she said. “It would be difficult to find 12 who haven’t formed an opinion, or at least thought about it.”

However, Dimitrius said, each side will probably cancel out the other in rejecting “the worst” jurors, ending up with a panel that falls “in the middle of the road.”

Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg has asked for 100 to 150 prospective jurors today and another 250 for Tuesday.

Each will fill out one questionnaire about whether service on a long trial would create a hardship--for economic, career or health reasons, for example--and a second detailing personal background, including whether they have been molested or know anyone who has been sexually abused.

Attorneys for both sides then will question them privately about sensitive areas--like a previous molestation--and publicly about other aspects of their backgrounds and opinions.

Each side can reject at least 10 candidates without giving a reason; an unlimited number can be rejected for “cause”--specific indications that they could not listen to all the evidence and arrive at a fair verdict.

The process should take about three weeks, with about 20 candidates being screened each day. Opening statements are expected to begin in mid-May.

Most of the dozen local prosecutors and defense attorneys asked by The Times about what difficulties picking a second trial jury might pose said they did not expect problems.

“We wouldn’t want 12 who’d never heard of McMartin,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Pam Ferrero, one of two prosecutors in the case. “They’d live in a cave.

“The standard is whether they can avoid prejudging and put aside” any opinions based on what they’ve heard or read about the matter, once tagged “the child abuse case of the century,” she said. They must be able to base their verdict on the evidence presented to them.

Buckey’s attorney, Danny Davis, could not be reached for comment.

But Ferrero was echoed by a leading defense attorney, Gerald Chaleff, who agreed that the publicity surrounding the case has engendered a “type of polarity that makes it extremely difficult to get a jury that is unbiased.

“That is not to say you can’t get a fair jury. Jurors show a remarkable ability to put aside their biases,” he said.

Another noted defense attorney, Joel Isaacson, however, said he fears that selecting a McMartin jury will be “next to impossible.”

“Everybody’s heard of it, and the majority have made up their minds that he did or didn’t do it,” he said.

Although Buckey was acquitted in January on all but 13 of the 53 molestation and conspiracy counts against him, Isaacson said, “most of the public thinks he’s guilty, even though they haven’t sat through one minute of testimony.”

Most of those familiar with the case are confident that the first witnesses in Buckey’s retrial will take the stand before June.

Prosecutors have charged Buckey on eight of the 13 counts on which the jury could not reach a verdict. They involve three girls--toddlers at the time of the alleged sexual abuse, pre-teens now--who attended the McMartin family’s Manhattan Beach nursery school. One is a new witness who did not testify at the earlier trial.

At the end of that trial, which lasted nearly three years and broke all criminal court records for length and cost, Buckey’s mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, was acquitted of the 12 molestation counts against her.

Most of the jurors said they were not convinced that Ray Buckey was innocent but, based on the evidence presented, did not feel the prosecution had proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Because of flaws in the investigation, said one, “We will never really know what happened or didn’t happen at that school.”