PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Ralph Cipriano
Prospective Juror No. 61 told a judge today that his first cousin was a priest who got in trouble over “something he wrote to a fifth-grader.”
The prospective juror mentioned to the judge that he had talked over his potential jury service last night with his wife, something the judge had specifically asked him not to do, and that the wife suggested that maybe you should mention your first cousin.
Father Michael Murtha was a priest at St. Anselm’s in Northeast Philadelphia who in 1995 was found by a roommate to have a trove of pornographic magazines and videos stashed in his rectory bedroom. The roommate also discovered a love letter that Father Murtha had written but never sent to a seventh-grade altar boy that described the priest’s sexual fantasies involving the youngster, signed your “secret lover.”
Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti challenged the candidacy of Prospective Juror 61. “I am disturbed about that relation,”Judge Ellen Ceisler said, as well as the fact that “he talked with his wife.”
The judge granted Cipolletti’s challenge to boot Prospective Juror No. 61. It was the most peculiar interview of the day as the judge and lawyers in the case slogged through questionnaires from 129 prospective jurors, before finally choosing six more, for a total of ten jurors in the case.
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