Judge to hear arguments concerning key issues on eve of Laken Riley murder trial

By Joe Johnson

The judge overseeing the Laken Riley murder case will be asked this week to consider several defense motions ahead of next month’s scheduled start of trial for the nursing student’s accused killer, Jose Antonio Ibarra.

The hearing is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Friday in Clarke County Superior Court in downtown Athens. It will be presided over by Judge H. Patrick Haggard, with the prosecution headed by Sheila Ross from the Georgia Prosecuting Attorney’s Council, and the defense team led by Western Judicial Circuit Public Defender John Donnelly.

Among the motions is a request for a change of venue, and another seeks to have one of the indictment’s 10 charges tried separately from the others.

It will be impossible to select an impartial jury in Athens-Clarke County, the motion states, because media coverage of the case has been “unduly excessive, factually incorrect, inflammatory or reflective of an atmosphere of hostility.” It also alleges that having the county as the trial’s venue would be “inherently prejudicial to (Ibarra),” noting how the University of Georgia is a prominent institution in the community.

There also is a motion that asks Haggard to supress several items of evidence that includes expert testimony about the scientific method used to match a thumbprint on Riley’s cell phone to Ibarra, when investigators were unable to make a match when they initially compared the thumbprint to Ibarra.

Other evidence includes scientific testing that prosecutors say matched Riley’s DNA to hairs found on bloodstained clothing that Ibarra disposed of immediately after Riley was killed, and matched the defendant’s DNA to skin found under Riley’s fingernails.

DNA conducted by a Georgia Bureau of Investigation forensic biologist “did not exclude Defendant, but also did not exclude another known individual associated with the case,” the defense motion states.

Alleged incriminating data from such social media as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat should not be admissible as evidence during the trial, another motion argues, because it was obtained by police during an illegal search of Ibarra’s cellphone.

The charge that the defense claims should be

tried separately from the 10-count criminal indictment accuses Ibarra of being a peeping Tom

It stems from The peeping charge stems from Ibarra allegedly peering through the window of an apartment at University Village, a student housing complex next door to where Ibarra lived at Argo Apartments on South Milledge Avenue. That incident happened earlier in the morning of Riley’s murder.

The prosecution included that incident with Riley’s murder “only because the crimes are of a similar character,” the defense motion states, but “joinder

would also create significant prejudice and would violate Defendant’s due process rights to a fair trial.”

Judge Haggard has scheduled jury selection to begin on Nov. 13 with opening statements set for Nov. 18.