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Jury picks questioned

• Wednesday's hearing dealt largely with jury pool selection.

J.D. Sumner

LEESBURG — Lawyers for a Lee County man accused of killing a widely known real estate agent questioned the officials who chose the grand jury that indicted him challenging the constitutionality of the process during the latest of several scheduled hearings Wednesday.

Corrie Denby, 30, has been indicted for murder for his suspected role in the death of Pat Murphy, whose body was found inside his Lee County home in December 2006.

Investigators believe that Murphy died from a combination of blunt force trauma and knife wounds.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case.

Wednesday, Denby and his lawyers sat in Lee County Superior Court with District Attorney Cecilia Cooper and her staff for a preliminary hearing in front of Judge George Peagler.

During the hearing, lawyers questioned witnesses including Lee County Clerk Sondra Cook and Jury Commissioner Ruth Goodson about the means used to compile information to select the jury pools for both the grand and traverse juries.

Defense attorneys argue that the means by which Lee County authorities pick the grand jury and the trial or traverse jury is not constitutional because it doesn’t fairly provide a sampling of the community.

During her testimony, Cook explained that an outside firm provides her office with guidelines and lists of possible jury candidates obtained through census, voting registration and drivers’ license records and that candidates for the jury pool were selected based on the guidelines for fairness.

Those guidelines established goals for selecting a fair number of jurors based on race, gender and age.

Defense attorneys questioned both Cook and Goodson about race and its’ determination in the process and what role it played in sorting out potential jurors, and asked whether or not anyone involved in the process had been told to not consider a person for service on the jury and for what reason.

Throughout the hearing, Denby sat with his attorneys, often looking around into the audience and conferring with his lawyers.

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