Attorneys Test Likelihood of Juror Bias in Dally Case

Amid the legal briefs and motions in the court file of People vs. Diana Haun and Michael Dally sits a dictionary-size stack of newspaper clippings dating back to the day the case began making banner headlines.

Those articles, combined with coverage from radio and television stations, prompted prosecutors and defense attorneys recently to survey hundreds of random jurors about their knowledge of the high-profile case.

Armed with survey statistics, public defenders plan to file a motion in the coming weeks requesting that the upcoming trial be moved out of Ventura County.

If they prevail, it would mark the first time in nearly 20 years that a murder trial has been transferred out of local courts.

But according to legal experts, proving that pretrial publicity has tainted a prospective jury pool can be a tough sell.

“It is not easy,” said USC law professor Michael J. Brennan. “Generally speaking, courts are not anxious to grant motions for a change of venue.”

Strictly from a legal standpoint, Brennan said a court must decide that because of the nature of the pretrial publicity, it would be very difficult to find a fair jury locally.

The court must also conclude that if the case were tried somewhere else, publicity would not have the same effect there.

In addition, Brennan said the logistics of moving murder cases around the state can be complicated and expensive.

“My experience is that change-of-venue motions tend to be granted in cases where you are dealing with smaller communities and local people with some notoriety, or because the case itself involves facts that are unusually heinous,” Brennan said.

But according to Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Harland W. Braun, the Dally-Haun case fits that criteria.

“It seems to me that it probably should be granted,” Braun said of the motion. “You have a highly publicized local case and any intelligent juror is going to know about it.”

Braun added, “This is one of these cases where if you haven’t heard of it, where have you been living?”

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Dally, 36, and Haun, 35, are accused of plotting and carrying out the abduction and murder of Dally’s wife, Sherri.

The homemaker and day-care operator was abducted May 6 from a Ventura shopping center parking lot. Her stabbed and bludgeoned remains were found by a search party of friends in a narrow ravine north of the city June 1.

Haun, a Port Hueneme resident who had been having an affair with Michael Dally for two years, was arrested and charged with murder in August.

In November, Dally was also arrested and charged with murder after a second inquiry by the grand jury.

The pair now face the death penalty if convicted. They are scheduled for a joint trial May 20--exactly a year after the case first grabbed the public’s attention when police sought help in finding Sherri Dally.

In recent weeks, prosecutors and defense attorneys have surveyed jurors to determine how much they know about the case. They have also hired experts to analyze the data.

About 500 jurors voluntarily returned a four-page questionnaire created by Haun’s defense team this month. Prosecutors put together a more lengthy survey that was distributed to about the same number of people last week.

Neither side would discuss the contents of their questionnaires nor the case itself.

Whatever the surveys reveal, law professor Brennan doubts Haun and Dally have generated the media hype of more celebrated murder suspects, whose trials have stayed in the counties where the crimes occurred.

“It is obviously not the O.J. Simpson case,” he said.

But for Ventura County, some attorneys say the Dally-Haun case ranks among the most celebrated cases in county’s history.

“I think it is right up there,” said Ventura defense attorney George Eskin. As to whether the publicity has tainted the jury pool, however, Eskin said, “I would really like to see the results of the surveys.”

Only four murder cases have been moved outside the county in the last 25 years, according to longtime prosecutors.

In 1976, the celebrated Skyhorse-Mohawk case was moved to Los Angeles County. Paul Skyhorse Durant and Richard Mohawk were accused of slaying cab driver George Aird, whose mutilated body was found near an American Indian Movement camp in Box Canyon near Simi Valley. The murder trial lasted one year and ended in an acquittal in early 1978.

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In 1978 and 1979, the murder trials of Ruben Torres and Johnny Lopez were moved to Los Angeles County. Torres, Lopez, along with Tony Matson, were accused of savagely attacking a young couple in the fields behind Channel Islands High School in Oxnard.

In separate trials, the pair were convicted of killing the teenage boy and raping and beating the girl. Matson, who was a juvenile at the time, was tried in Orange County a few years after his cohorts.

In 1979, the high-profile murder trial of Theodore Frank was moved to Orange County, where Frank was convicted of the brutal kidnap-murder of 2 1/2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz.

The child was abducted from the frontyard of her baby-sitter’s house in Camarillo, raped, tortured and mutilated with locking pliers before being strangled to death.

Frank was sentenced to death, but in 1985 the California Supreme Court reversed the sentence. A new penalty trial was held in 1987, and again an Orange County jury returned a verdict of death.

More recently, defense attorneys tried to move the 1994 murder trial of Mark Scott Thornton, the 20-year-old Thousand Oaks man convicted of killing Westlake nurse Kellie O’Sullivan.

Surveys before the trial indicated a 85% recognition rate, yet the case was not relocated.

“Our argument, which was successful, was that it didn’t matter,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris, one of the prosecutors on the case. “Although people had heard about the case, they did not know much about it.”

Defense attorneys for Daniel Allan Tuffree, the 49-year-old former schoolteacher accused of killing a Simi Valley police officer, tried to keep residents from Moorpark and Simi Valley off the jury at his first trial last year. Their request was denied. The case ended in a deadlocked jury in October, and is now being retried.

“I think among other things, research has shown that you can get fair trials on well-known cases,” said Richard Holmes, head of the major crimes unit for the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

“The world does not revolve around the criminal justice system, and peoples’ lives do not revolve around the latest case in the criminal justice system,” he said.

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But in a murder trial where the sentence could mean taking another person’s life, defense attorney Braun said a defendant’s rights to a fair trial become all the more critical.

And if changing the jury pool can ensure that, Braun said, a case like the Dally-Haun trial should be moved.

“Because of the death penalty, it is even more sensitive,” he said. “There is no reason a Northern California jury couldn’t decide this thing fairly.”