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Prosecution claims news story doesn’t compromise the case

LOCK HAVEN — The prosecution flatly rebutted the defense’s motion for dismissal of the murder charges against Loyd Groves because of press coverage.

According to the prosecution, the press coverage in question did not compromise the case and the Commonwealth was simply continuing its investigation based on new information.

“The new information provided by the defendant’s ex-wife led to additional investigative efforts in an attempt to locate the body of the victim. Those efforts included the use of cadaver dogs, metal detectors and foot searches of the Groves property in June and July 2018,” Senior Deputy Attorney General Daniel J. Dye wrote in his Aug. 8 response to the defense motion.

Dye said the Commonwealth continues to receive information and to follow up on leads that members of the public report, and that information has been and will be turned over to the defendant, Groves, through his counsel, as it becomes available.

“Outrage levied at the press and assertions the Commonwealth failed to (keep) secret its activity in the course of an investigation have no merit, and no relief is required,” Dye said.

The Commonwealth claims the defendant’s motion “laments the activity of the free press and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” and concludes there is no basis for the dismissal of charges based on press coverage related to the case.

“The Commonwealth has made no comment on the facts of this case to the press and has limited any such statement to requests for additional information, which is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.,” he continued.

“This stands in contrast to an interview given by a member of the defense team who discussed plea negotiations with a reporter, John Beauge, on the eve of jury selection, which led to the Commonwealth asking that such impermissible discussion not be made public since such discussion lacks vital and appropriate context,” Dye said.

Because a dismissal is not appropriate relief for the Commonwealth’s ongoing, sometimes publicly visible, effort to obtain evidence, according to Dye, the Commonwealth will treat the defendant’s motion as yet another motion for change of venue based on local press coverage.

And, the motion for a change of venue should be denied, Dye continued.

The mere existence of pretrial publicity does not create a presumption of prejudice, he said. Members of the potential jury pool may have some knowledge about a case or have even formed an opinion based on news coverage they have seen or read, but the question asked is whether it is possible for those jurors to set aside their initial impressions and render a verdict on the evidence presented in the courtroom, Dye said.

He also said a change might be in order if the publicity “has been so extensive, so sustained and so pervasive that the community must be deemed to have been saturated with it.”

If the court concludes the publicity has saturated the community, it must then analyze the timing of that saturation, Dye said.

“If the publicity is sufficiently removed from the time of trial such that there has been a ‘cooling-off period,’ it can be said that the prejudicial effect of the publicity has dissipated,” Dye said.

Many, if not most, of the news reports related to this case are almost 30 years old, he said. Other articles moving into the 2000s simply point out that the victim is still “missing.” And more recent articles, in 2015 and forward, simply report the process of the case since charges were filed. Articles printed in 2017 and 2018 largely report on the process of scheduling and jury selection.

“The article about the police search simply notes one occurred. This is run-of-the-mill coverage for a criminal case in Pennsylvania,” Dye said.

“The article in question notes that no information was provided regarding the search. The article leaves the reader to wonder what, if anything, helpful or harmful to the defendant was found. It is, in fact, just an article regarding police walking on property,” Dye said.

“Certainly there has been a sufficient cooling-off period in the present case, unlike the comments of a member of the defense team on the eve of jury selection, the coverage of which the defendant complains will be old news by the time of trial in November 2018,” he said.

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