Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 26, 1993 TAG: 9308260040
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BEDFORD LENGTH: Medium
It took all day to select 12 jurors and one alternate. Jury selection had been expected to take about half a day.
Opening statements by prosecutor Jim Updike and Whitt's defense attorney, Harry Garrett, were delayed until this morning.
Garrett's concerns about publicity were raised in part by stories that appeared in the Roanoke Times & World-News on Tuesday and the Lynchburg News & Daily-Advance on Wednesday. Both newspapers circulate in Bedford County, where all the prospective jurors live.
The Roanoke story detailed the friendly rivalry between Updike and Garrett, former law partners who are facing each other in a murder trial for the eighth time.
The Lynchburg story recounted some previously reported details of the case, mostly taken from court documents.
Whitt is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Roy Thompson, who was killed when Whitt hit him with his own pickup truck on a road near Goode in 1991.
She has said that Thompson jumped in front of the truck in an apparent suicide attempt. But after authorities discovered that Whitt had tried to collect on Thompson's $100,000 life insurance policy and had forged his name to make her his lone beneficiary, they charged her with murder.
The Lynchburg newspaper story included a map showing where Thompson was killed, calling it the "murder site."
Whitt has not been convicted of murder, only charged; and it has not been proven that Thompson's death was anything but accidental. In addition, the Lynchburg story quoted a Roanoke County prosecutor who has tried Whitt on other charges in the past as saying she is a "menace on society."
Garrett and his co-counsel, Rodney Fitzpatrick of Roanoke, particularly objected to those two elements of the Lynchburg story.
They asked Circuit Judge William Sweeney to continue the trial to a later date, and grant a change of venue or bring in a jury from another jurisdiction.
Sweeney turned down both requests, but he did allow prospective jurors to be interviewed by Updike and Garrett three at a time rather than five at once, which slowed the selection process.
Forty possible jurors were called to court Wednesday; 27 of them were interviewed, mostly about pretrial publicity and whether they knew any of the 40-some witnesses scheduled to testify. The trial is expected to last a week.
by CNB