Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Judge calls request to move trial ‘premature’
Despite three difficult days of jury selection for Dalia Dippolito’s retrial on a 2009 murder-for-hire charge, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley said Monday he’s not yet ready “to pull the plug.”
There are still 55 prospective jurors remaining from an original pool of 196, with most of the cuts coming as a result of people having heard something about the Boynton Beach woman accused of trying to arrange a fatal hit on her spouse.
Lawyers for Dippolito want the rest of the jury pool to be wiped out — and the trial moved elsewhere
— over concerns she “is never going to get a fair trial.” Prosecutors want to keep trying on Tuesday to select six jurors and a couple of alternates.
“This is terrifying,” defense attorney Greg Rosenfeld said, adding his client’s constitutional rights were being “eviscerated” because so many potential jurors had seen mostly negative publicity over the high-profile case or already decided she’s guilty.
Kelley investigated a comment from a prospective juror that some information about the case had “started to circulate a bit” in the hallway outside the courtroom at one point during jury selection last Thursday.
Dippolito, 34, is accused of hiring a Boynton Beach police officer, posing as a hit man, to kill her husband of six months. The defense said it has become impossible to pick a fair and impartial jury.
Judge Kelley conceded the “case has garnered a lot of attention,” but called the defense request for a change of venue “premature.”
“We’ve done our best under the circumstances,” he said, pointing to those prospective jurors who said Dippolito is a mystery to them.
Defense attorney Brian Claypool argued that the Dippolito case publicity has strong parallels to the Casey Anthony murder trial from 2011, when jurors were selected in Clearwater and taken to Orlando for her trial, which ended in an acquittal.
“This is a contaminated jury pool in Palm Beach,” Claypool said, noting how many of the potential jurors had told the court they were aware of Dippolito from news reports and footage of Boynton Beach police officers approaching her at a police-staged fake-murder scene. “We can’t trust ... these prospective jurors.”
The judge later said he doesn’t assume jurors are lying if they say they are unfamiliar with the case.
“You have to evaluate are these folks being truthful or not?” Kelley explained.
Assistant State Attorneys Laura Laurie and Craig Williams urged jury selection to continue, contending publicity is an issue regardless of where the jurors live.
Laurie suggested it wouldn’t be hard to call in more prospective jurors if needed from Palm Beach County, which has more than one million citizens.
Laurie also accused Claypool of adding to the problem, because he has been posting jury selection updates on his Twitter account.
Claypool fired back his tweets were simply a tool to keep his followers informed, and “pale in comparison” to the fact that it was Boynton Beach police who posted on YouTube a video of police officers approaching Dippolito at a police-staged, fake murder scene.
That video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, contributing to international news coverage.
Claypool also noted the former lead prosecutor on the case co-wrote a 2014 book about the Dippolito case, called, “Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam: Inside Dalia Dippolito’s Plot to Kill.”
Dippolito remains charged with solicitation to commit first-degree murder with a firearm. Dippolito’s 2011 trial conviction and sentence of 20 years in prison was later thrown out by a state appeals court.
The court ruled Dippolito did not receive a fair trial because prospective jurors — including those later picked for the panel — had heard an allegation that she once tried to poison then spouse Michael Dippolito.
Kelley, who did not preside over the first trial, made sure this time to question each juror separately about their Dippolito knowledge.
Claypool on Monday argued that publicity surrounding the Dippolito case is greater than media coverage in 2014 for the second DUI manslaughter trial of Wellington polo club founder John Goodman. That was the last time a trial in Palm Beach County featured jurors picked from another area; a panel was selected in Tampa and then sequestered for about three weeks in West Palm Beach.
But Goodman’s lawyers asked for a change of venue for the trial months before the scheduled start of jury selection. Dippolito’s defense said they waited on making the request in order to first see if it would be possible to pick a jury in Palm Beach County.
The lawyers also are waiting on Kelley to rule on their latest request to dismiss the case outright, over claims Dippolito is the victim of entrapment by Boynton Beach police.
In an odd development Monday, a girlfriend of Dippolito’s who has been observing jury selection testified that she heard a female prospective juror utter the remark “we’ve got her” in a cynical tone inside the courtroom. But the woman denied making the statement, and other prospective jurors said they didn’t hear it either. Jury selection continued.
If the lawyers are able to select a jury, Dippolito’s second trial is expected to take five or six days.