http://politics.kfyi.com/cc-common/mainheadlines3.html?feed=118695&article=11339052
County Attorney: Arias Retrial is On Track
But several factors could make it unnecessary
(May 30, 2013)
(Ted Houston, KFYI News) The do-over of the penalty phase of the Jodi Arias murder trial is moving forward, according to Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery.
He told reporters on Thursday, "We're preparing for a retrial," which is currently scheduled to begin in mid-July.
However, he says there are several things that could make a retrial unnecessary.
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Prosecutors always have an ethical obligation to take into consideration anything that might be proposed by the defendant or their counsel," Montgomery says.
Then there's the issue of how a retrial would affect the victim's family in this case, the family of murder victim Travis Alexander. "Victims have a constitutional right to confer with the prosecutor prior to disposition of the case," he says. "They also have a constitutional right to be treated with fairness, respect, and dignity. So victim input is very important to me." The Alexander family could ask, for example, that prosecutors be satisfied with a sentence of life in prison so as to avoid putting them through all the gruesome testimony all over again.
Montgomery notes that while the original penalty phase where jurors deadlocked 8-to-4 in favor of the death penalty only lasted a couple of weeks, a retrial would likely last much longer.