Judge Dismisses Potential Jurors in Double-Murder Case : Courts: A prosecutor denies that he intended to screen women out of the panel in trial of Taiwanese national accused of killing husband’s mistress, their son.

An Orange County Superior Court judge dismissed more than 60 potential jurors Thursday after a defense attorney for a Taiwanese woman accused of killing her millionaire husband’s mistress and their infant son accused the prosecution of systematically excluding women and Asian Americans from the jury.

Although Judge Kathleen E. O’Leary did not find that Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko was purposely targeting women or Asian Americans, she ruled that the defense perception alone warranted starting jury selection over again on Monday, attorneys said.

The dispute came on the fourth day of jury selection in the double-murder trial of Li-Yun (Lisa) Peng, 45, of Rancho Santa Margarita. Peng is a Taiwanese national accused of killing her husband’s mistress, Ranbing (Jennifer) Ji of Mission Viejo, in a jealous rage and smothering the woman’s 5-month-old son, Kevin, in August, 1993.

On Thursday, Molko said that 12 of the 14 potential jurors he dismissed were women, but insisted that he asked that they be removed from the case for reasons other than gender. One woman, for example, suffered a mental illness and was prone to mood swings, while another said she believed her boyfriend had been unjustly accused and convicted of a crime, the prosecutor said.

“There is no way I thought any of them would be fair jurors in the case, so what am I supposed to do?” Molko said, adding that he respected the judge’s decision but did not agree with it.

Defense attorney Marshall M. Schulman said, however, that he also asked for the jury pool’s dismissal because two of the potential jurors Molko dismissed were Asian Americans. Schulman acknowledged he had no evidence that Molko was purposely targeting women or Asian Americans, but he said he was disturbed by the pattern he saw.

“It was 12 in a row, all women,” Schulman said. The prosecutor “would be in the best position to judge what was in his mind at the time.”

Schulman also said that he believed many of the men who answered questions in the same way as their female counterparts were kept on the jury, while the women were dismissed.

Schulman said he is only trying to make sure his client receives a fair trial. He said it does not matter to his case whether there are more women than men on the jury panel.

“All I want is a balanced jury, with a good cross-section of folks, a variety of people from all walks of life,” he said.

Molko likewise said he has no interest in stacking the jury with men. He said the jury panel had five women and seven men when the potential jurors were dismissed.

“The victim in the case is a woman and the defendant in this case is a woman, so I’m not sure how this all matters,” Molko said, adding that he fears his alternative is to leave unfit jurors on a panel to meet a quota. “It sounds like an unfair burden on either side if that is the state of the system.”

The tale of wealth and alleged marital betrayal has captured the attention of Chinese Americans and Asians around the world, not unlike the international spotlight focused on the O.J. Simpson double-murder case.