(Headline USA) Attorneys for a man accused of killing a nursing student whose body was found on the University of Georgia campus have asked a judge to move the case to another county.
The request may be a risky proposition for Jose Ibarra, the Venezuelan national who eluded both Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement before making his way to Athens-Clarke County.
The college town is something of a blue enclave, according to 2020 election data. While Clarke County went 70.2% for pro-open-borders President Joe Biden, every surrounding county backed pro-enforcement hawk Donald Trump.
Nonetheless, Ibarra’s lawyers maintained that finding an impartial jury there to consider the murder and other charges for the killing of Laken Hope Riley would be impossible.
Riley was killed on the campus of U.Ga., a “prominent institution” in Athens, and the case had received extensive media coverage locally, attorneys John Donnelly and Kaitlyn Beck said in a court filing.
Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard said during the brief hearing that he was planning to start jury selection on Nov. 13 and then proceed with the trial the following week.
He gave prosecutors 10 days to respond to the request for a change of venue, which was filed on Thursday.
A 2013 Georgia court decision found that a change of venue is proper in cases where media coverage is “‘unduly extensive, factually incorrect, inflammatory, or reflective of an atmosphere of hostility,'” according to the filing.
Yet, the case has also received considerable national exposure, particularly in conservative media, which are more likely to have reached potential jurors in the surrounding rural regions.
Trump has played up the grisly murder to underscore the danger that open-border policies have created for average citizens under Democrat rule. That included a series of poignant ad spots emphasizing the innocent victims of immigrant crime.
You're not safe in Joe Biden's America. pic.twitter.com/4oCPJjpzKv
— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) February 27, 2024
Meanwhile Biden–Harris Democrats scrambled in an effort to memory-hole the story, with the president pointedly refusing to acknowledge it or say the name of the deceased until his State of the Union.
While complying with a request from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to “say her name,” Biden mispronounced it as “Lincoln Riley,” which is the name of the head football coach at the University of Southern California.
A shackled Ibarra appeared in court on Friday dressed in a button-front shirt and slacks.
A grand jury in early May returned an indictment charging Ibarra, 26, with murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping and other crimes in the February killing of Riley.
The 10-count indictment accuses him of hitting the 22-year-old Augusta University College of Nursing student in the head, asphyxiating her and pulling up her clothing with the intent to rape her.
He pleaded not guilty in May.
Riley’s body was found Feb. 22 near running trails after a friend told police she had not returned from a morning run, and police have said her killing appeared to be a random attack. Ibarra was arrested the next day and has been held in the Athens–Clarke County Jail without bond since then.
The indictment charges Ibarra with one count of malice murder, three counts of felony murder and one count each of kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated battery, hindering an emergency telephone call, tampering with evidence and peeping Tom.
The indictment says that on the day of Riley’s killing, Ibarra had peered into the window of an apartment in a university housing building, which is the basis for the peeping Tom charge.
In a separate filing on Thursday, Ibarra’s attorneys said that charge should be tried separately from the others because the alleged victim is different.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
