MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Valerie Hans is an expert on the jury system and a professor of law at Cornell. She says it's very hard to get a change of venue request approved, and it should be hard.
VALERIE HANS: And there is some logistical things, too, that it's a lot easier for victims and witnesses to attend proceedings, to observe what is going on and to see how the local attorneys are managing the case on their behalf.
BLOCK: But from the defense point of view, there is the issue of taint and whether their client is going to be getting a fair trial. So how does a judge weigh that against the interest of having a trial in the community in which the crime occurred?
HANS: There's another matter, too, in the Tucson shootings. There were so many victims. And so you have lots of people in the local community who might be directly connected to one of the victims of the shootings. And that might also make it very difficult to find a jury that is unbiased in the City of Tucson.
BLOCK: Professor Hans, do you look back at the decision in the Oklahoma City bombing case, to move that trial from Oklahoma City to Denver? Do you look at that and say that is really the model that will likely be followed in Arizona? Of course, in Oklahoma City, there were many, many more victims.
HANS: I think that Timothy McVeigh case is a really good model. In Oklahoma City, again, the many connections that community members had with the victims made it extremely difficult to have a fair and unbiased jury, or select a fair and unbiased jury, in the usual methods that the trial court relies on to try to weed out people who really can be fair and open in listening to the evidence of the case. And in Tucson, there may very well be the same kind of connections in the local community.
BLOCK: And it's those connections that are really the key here, right? Because they don't expect jurors to be a complete blank slate, never having heard of a crime. The question is, can they be impartial?
HANS: And it's going to be up Judge Larry Burns to balance all of these factors; the desire for Tucson to see justice done in this particular case in its own community, and the rights of the defendant to have a fair and impartial jury decide the case.
BLOCK: Professor Hans, thanks for talking with us.
HANS: My pleasure.
BLOCK: Valerie Hans is a professor at Cornell Law School.