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Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Turner trial to leave Forsyth County
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lynn Turner, the former 911 operator convicted of fatally poisoning her husband, will stand trial outside of Forsyth County for allegedly killing her firefighter boyfriend by similar means.
Forsyth County Chief Superior Court Judge Jeffrey S. Bagley ordered Turner’s capital murder trial moved out of the county on Tuesday because of pretrial publicity.
District Attorney Penny Penn initially fought a defense motion to move the trial from the fast-growing northside county, where Turner grew up and where Randy Thompson, a firefighter and the father of Turner’s two children, died in 2001.
But on Tuesday morning, as a second week of jury selection was about to begin, Penn conceded that chances of finding an impartial jury in the county were unlikely.
“It was just too big a story,” she said.
“They [prospective jurors] knew about it, and they knew a lot about it.”
A new location and date for the trial could be determined by late this week or early next week, officials said. Walker County, in northwest Georgia near the Tennessee state line, has been mentioned in the past as a possible site, because it’s outside the Atlanta media market, where Turner’s case — with its themes of poison, sex, love and money — has made headlines on and off for years.
Turner, 38, was convicted in 2004 of malice murder in the 1995 antifreeze poisoning death of her husband, Cobb County police officer Maurice Glenn Turner, and sentenced to life in prison.
Her trial in that case was moved from Cobb County to Houston County in Middle Georgia, also because of pretrial publicity.
In the first week of jury selection in her trial in Thompson’s death, about 100 prospective jurors were interviewed.
At least 80 percent of them knew some details — and many of them were aware of her previous trial and conviction in Glenn Turner’s death.
Lynn Turner’s defense team said 41 percent of the potential jurors had to be excused for having fixed opinions about the case. Prosecutors said it was closer to 36 percent, but both sides agreed that the percentages were well above what the courts have deemed acceptable.
Bagley agreed.
“It’s as clear as a bell,” he said. “I just wonder how they expect to get a jury in Fulton County in the Nichols’ case. I guess you’ve got to go through the exercise.”
Brian Nichols is accused of going on a shooting spree at the Fulton County courthouse and, ultimately, killing four people, including a judge.
Turner’s trial would have been the first death penalty trial in Forsyth County since the 1980s when Jack Potts was sentenced to die for the 1975 kidnapping and murder of a 24-year-old auto mechanic.
Prosecutors knew they were facing an uphill battle to find a jury in Forsyth County, where Turner once worked as a secretary at the courthouse.
But Penn said they’d hoped that, with the passage of time since Thompson’s death and the county’s rapid growth, they could find enough people who didn’t know about the case to make a jury of 12 and three alternates.
“It didn’t pan out,” said Jack Mallard, a special prosecutor who was brought in to assist with the case.
Staff writer Jane O. Hansen contributed to this report.
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