By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
With a trial scheduled to begin in just two weeks for two defendants accused of causing the death of a 19-month-old child in 2021, their attorneys and the prosecutor continue hammering out concerns about testimony limits, jury selection and other details.
The child had been left in the care of Serenity Brown and Devin Pierce on a March evening when emergency personnel responded to a call about an unresponsive child, who was transported to T.J. Samson Community Hospital and later pronounced deceased. An autopsy was performed after detectives observed “suspicious bruising” on the child’s head.
“The results of the autopsy determined the child died from blunt impact injuries of the head, and the manner of death was ruled homicide,” according to a press release from the Barren County Sheriff’s Office at the time.
At a pretrial conference Monday in Barren Circuit Court, a handful of motions meant to address the concerns – and their current statuses – were summarized for Circuit Judge John T. Alexander.
Commonwealth’s Attorney John Gardner said he has now sent the articles relied upon by his expert witness to form her conclusions in the case to the defense attorneys, who are David Broderick for Pierce and Ken Garrett for Brown, and in turn he has requested comparable information from the defense’s expert witness.
The defense attorneys have also requested to have additional and separate-from-each-other options for removing potential jurors from the pool. Normally, the defense is allowed eight “strikes” or nine if an alternate juror is going to be seated, Alexander said.
After a few minutes of discussion among the attorneys and the judge, the judge said he believed he would allow nine mutual strikes plus each of the two defense attorneys would have two strikes they could use independent of the other one.
“I think that’s fair under the circumstances,” Alexander said.
Broderick had also previously questioned whether a law-enforcement witness’ testimony was going to include information about why a security video clip was no longer available, and Gardner said he intends for that person’s testimony to be about what he saw on the video clip without addressing its current unavailability or why that is the case, which seemed to suit Broderick.
After additional brief discussions, Alexander said he would not schedule any further pretrial conferences unless new issues were brought to him via motions.
The trial is scheduled for March 18-21.
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