Hirschfield change-of-venue bid withdrawn
SACRAMENTO — It looks like Richard Hirschfield will have his trial in Sacramento County.
Lawyers for the alleged killer of UC Davis students John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves withdrew their bid for a change of venue Friday after their own experts opined that pretrial publicity about the case was unlikely to result in a tainted jury pool.
The passage of time since the crime — 31 years this month — contributed to the experts’ opinions.
Before lead defense attorney Linda Parisi withdrew the motion, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Sweet said he was inclined to deny a change-of-venue request. But he invited the defense to renew its bid, if necessary, during the jury-selection process.
“It seems to me you will know once you get panels in here … how extensive their knowledge of the case will be,” Sweet said.
Sweet also said he would allow the use of juror questionnaires and individual, sequestered questioning of potential jurors on the publicity issue to weed out those who might have formed an opinion about the potential death-penalty case.
“That has been my practice, and I think it has been a good one,” Sweet said.
Also on Friday, attorneys debated whether the jury that is selected should be allowed to view portions of a suicide note written by Hirschfield’s brother.
Joseph Hirschfield committed suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning in his own car in 2002, a day after Sacramento authorities questioned him about the discovery of his brother’s DNA at the Riggins/Gonsalves murder scene.
But first, he penned a note to his wife.
“Richard did commit those murders,” Joseph Hirschfield wrote about the Dec. 20, 1980, kidnappings and slayings of Riggins and Gonsalves.
But because Joseph Hirschfield is no longer alive to be questioned about the note, prosecuting attorney Dawn Bladet wants the jury to hear excerpts of it pertaining to Joseph: “I have been living with this horror for 20 years.” “But I was there.” “But my DNA is still there.”
“Joseph Hirschfield did, in fact, commit these crimes with Richard Hirschfield,” Bladet said in court Friday, noting that Joseph lived in Rancho Cordova — not far from where the victims’ bodies were found — at the time of slayings. “Were he alive, he would have been charged as an aider and abetter.”
But Parisi argued that introducing the note would serve only to implicate her client. In addition to naming his brother as the alleged murderer, Joseph Hirschfield denied any personal responsibility for the deaths, she said.
“Clearly, what Joseph Hirschfield is trying to do is gift-wrap his history … as a present for law enforcement to pick up,” Parisi said. “It lacks reliability.”
Sweet ruled that the note “probably” is not admissible as either a dying declaration or a declaration against penal interest, as Bladet had argued in her pretrial motion on the issue.
But rather than dismiss the note outright, Sweet invited the attorneys to argue its inclusion under a lesser-used part of the evidence code relating to social stigma.
It sidesteps the hearsay rule “if the declarant is unavailable as a witness and the statement, when made … created such a risk of making him an object of hatred, ridicule or social disgrace in the community, that a reasonable man in his position would not have made the statement unless he believed it to be true,” the code states.
The Legislature “obviously intended it to have the same force as the other parts of that statute,” Sweet said, giving the attorneys until Dec. 30 to submit briefs on the issue. “It’s an interesting legal issue, quite frankly.”
Hirschfield’s trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 9.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8048. Follow her on Twitter @laurenkeene
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Posted by Lauren Keene
on Dec 10 2011.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 04:26:23 PM PDT
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