Elsinore Man’s Trial Moving?

With surveys showing that at least three-quarters of potential jurors know of the Samantha Runnion case, a judge is expected to decide this week if the widespread knowledge is enough to keep the 29-year-old man accused of killing her from receiving a fair trial in Orange County.

“Orange County is a hostile environment for this trial,” said defense consultant Edward Bronson, a retired Cal State Chico psychology professor who recommended last week that the judge move the trial. “The case was particularly powerful locally. This is every parent’s ultimate nightmare.”

Within hours of Samantha’s abduction on July 15, 2002, from outside her family’s Stanton condominium, photos of the child with her toothy smile, wavy auburn hair and red sweater flooded the airwaves. Three days after her nude body was found near Lake Elsinore, factory worker Alejandro Avila, who lived in that city, was arrested.

Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona was quoted as saying he was “100% certain” Avila was the killer. President Bush called Carona a hero for his department’s work on the case.

In the ensuing months, the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register published more than 400 articles about the crime, and the case was mentioned on radio and television reports that dubbed Avila a “monster” who deserved death.

Prosecutors said that the nearly three years since Samantha’s killing had blurred the public’s memory about the case and that simply knowing about the case did not mean a juror could not be fair.

But Avila’s attorneys argue that the media crush has prejudiced Orange County against their client and that he cannot receive a fair trial.

They say moving the trial to another county, as was done in the recent high-profile murder trial of Scott Peterson, is the best way to ensure a sufficient pool of open-minded potential jurors.

Jury selection in the Avila trial could start as soon as Feb. 28 if it stays in Orange County. Otherwise, it could be several months before the trial begins.

Last fall, prosecutors and the defense team each conducted telephone surveys of Orange County residents eligible to serve as jurors. Questions gauged the respondents’ knowledge about the case and their feelings about Avila’s guilt or innocence. In the prosecution’s survey, 75% of the more than 600 people interviewed knew about the upcoming trial and about half thought Avila was guilty. Most, however, also said that as jurors they would listen to the evidence before making a decision.

Many had forgotten the details of the case, remembering Samantha’s and Avila’s names only after prompting, said prosecution expert Ebbe Ebbesen, a psychology professor at UC San Diego.

In the defense’s survey, nearly 90% of respondents said they knew of the case.

Finding 12 impartial jurors in a county of 3 million nearly three years after Samantha’s death will not be difficult, Ebbesen said.

“People’s depth of knowledge is not nearly as great” as the defense’s survey implies, Ebbesen said. “Passage of time is a major factor.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. James Mulgrew, one of the prosecutors handling the case, agreed.

“We’re confident we can get a fair trial here,” he said. “It’s a very large county, and it’s been a long time since most of the publicity occurred in this case.” A hearing on whether to move the Avila trial began last week.

The defense surveyed 407 people, 86% of whom remembered the case. Of those, 28% said Avila was “definitely guilty,” and 21% said he was “probably guilty” and deserved the death penalty.

Some of those surveyed remembered Avila’s prior acquittal on child molestation charges and the vilification of the jurors in that case.

Bronson has conducted change-of-venue surveys in such high-profile cases as the state and federal trials of Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

He testified in the Avila hearing that he thought people would have a difficult time separating what they had heard from what was presented during a trial.

“The information gets internalized over a long period of time so it becomes what you believe about the case,” he said. “They have already developed a presumption of guilt.”

Attorneys cannot rely on jury selection to weed out jurors who will not be able to examine the evidence fairly, Bronson said. Many people answering questions formally in a courtroom tone down their comments, he said, for “social acceptance.”

Even considering the nationwide interest in the case and the fear it spawned in parents, Orange County residents were exposed to more information and thus would be more biased against Avila than people even one or two counties away, said Assistant Public Defender Denise Gragg.

“Orange County,” she said in court, “experienced this crime in a very different way than any other locality.”