"Prosecutors: Hearing on Fell juror conduct should be public," by Sam Hemingway of the Burlington Free Press.
Federal prosecutors say a hearing next week in the appeal of convicted killer Donald Fell should be conducted in open court, not in secret like his defense lawyers want.
At issue is whether three jurors held back information about themselves during Fell’s 2005 trial. Fell, 33, was convicted and given the death penalty for his involvement in the November 2000 drug- and alcohol-fueled kidnapping and murder of Terry King, a 53-year-old grandmother from North Clarendon. The federal prosecution was the first time in 50 years that a person was sentenced to death in Vermont.
In papers filed last week at U.S. District Court in Burlington, lawyers with the Vermont U.S. Attorney’s Office argued that the inquiry into the jurors’ behavior ought to be done in the open because it is a crucial part of an effort by Fell’s attorneys to seek a new trial or to have his sentence reduced.
“It would make little sense to require public scrutiny of criminal trials, but later permit the outcome of such trials to be vacated in secret collateral proceedings,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Darrow and federal trial lawyer Jacobed Rodriguez-Coss wrote in a six-page memorandum.
Fell’s lawyers, in papers previously filed with the court, asked Judge William Sessions III to hold the hearing on the jurors’ conduct in secret, arguing that doing so would allow the three jurors to speak more freely about the allegations against them.
Related posts are in the federal death penalty category index.
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