Judge Mulls Change of Venue in Irene Garza Case
By Naxiely Lopez-puente
The judge presiding over the case of a former priest accused of murdering a McAllen beauty queen will wait until next week before ruling on a change of venue petition by the defense — but his ruling could be to delay the decision even further. State District Judge Luis Singleterry heard arguments Wednesday from both the defense and prosecution regarding the media attention surrounding the Irene Garza case. The defense for John Feit said the case was too important to the community and had even swayed the last Hidalgo County district attorney election. The emotion surrounding the case makes it difficult for jurors to be impartial, the defense argued. “That’s just how our brains work,” expert witness Bryan Edelman told the court Wednesday. Edelman, co-founder and jury consultant at Trial Innovations, travels across the country conducting pre-trial research for various cases, including the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Edelman argued Hidalgo County voters have preconceived notions about Feit’s guilt based on the pervasiveness of media accounts. He conducted a community survey which indicated that out of 100 potential jurors, 53 of them think Feit is guilty. Feit is accused of killing Irene Garza, a McAllen schoolteacher and beauty queen in 1960 when he worked as a priest in the Rio Grande Valley. The 25-year-old woman was last seen April 16, 1960, going to confession at the Sacred Heart church in McAllen; authorities found her body five days later in a canal Prosecutor Michael Garza argued Hidalgo County jurors could remain impartial, and 12 could be found out of a pool of about 450,000 eligible jurors in the county. He argued that numbers can be manipulated and attempted to discredit the defense witness, questioning everything from sampling size to the wording of the survey question. He took particular aim at the first question researchers posed to respondents: Are you a U.S. citizen? “Only the people that live here can truly appreciate this (question),” Garza said. “You think people are honestly going to answer that question?” Garza, who called Edelman an outsider, questioned the veracity of respondents, spotlighting the area’s undocumented population and their fear of deportation amid the national anti-immigrant rhetoric. “It doesn’t take a Ph.D., judge,” Garza said. “It doesn’t take a professor; it doesn’t take somebody that gets paid 25-grand to throw this garbage before the court and watch you swallow it to know that that survey is flawed from question number one.” Edelman argued people are more honest when they are anonymous and said the research was done before the Trump Administration took office. It is also based on more than 40 years of study on social psychology within the legal realm. The prosecution argued the sample size of 329 people was too small to accurately depict the community. Edelman, however, argued the larger the audience, the smaller the sample size must be. “Have you ever heard why stats are like bikinis?” Garza asked Edelman during cross examination. “What they reveal is interesting, but what they cover up is crucial.” Moments later Edelman retorted, “If you don’t believe in sampling, then you don’t believe in science.” Edelman also presented a media-content analysis, referring specifically to information found in The Monitor, KGBT-TV and CBS’s “48 Hours.” He argued they contained emotional words in a story that was already “sensational” in nature. The Monitor published 63 stories on the case since 2008, he argued, though he included 12 stories from 1960 that the newspaper republished on its website in 2016. “What does that tell you?” defense attorney O. Rene Flores asked Edelman. “It reiterates the impact this case had on the community.” Together, they argued the case was so important to the community that it swayed the last district attorney’s race. The prosecution, however, would later argue there is no proof the case swayed voters. The only person who said the case had cost former District Attorney Rene Guerra the race was Guerra himself, Garza said. “That came from him,” he said, adding Guerra was “angry about losing his job.” Flores insisted his client deserved to have a fair and impartial trial by a jury or his peers. “It just ain’t right,” Flores said. “Just like Irene Garza is entitled to justice, so is John Bernard Feit.” Singleterry could make a ruling next week on the venue or could decide to hold off until jury selection begins this summer. If there is no change of venue, a trial date is set for Sept. 11. A pretrial date has been set for July 19. Contact: nlopez@themonitor.com
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