Jury selection begins in Rudolph trial
Suspect charged in Birmingham women's clinic bombing
By Henry Schuster
CNN
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Excerpts: "Hunting Eric Rudolph"
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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (CNN) -- More than seven years after an explosion at an Alabama women's clinic killed a police officer and severely injured a nurse, jury selection began Wednesday in the federal trial of bombing suspect Eric Rudolph.
Rudolph faces the possibility of the death penalty if he is convicted of the January 1998 bombing of the clinic in Birmingham where abortions were performed.
He faces separate federal charges in four bombings in Atlanta, Georgia -- one during the 1996 Summer Olympics, two at a suburban women's clinic that performed abortions, and one at a lesbian nightclub.
Jury selection will start in the ballroom of a downtown Birmingham hotel, a different setting than a more customary federal courtroom.
The venue is being used to accommodate the large number of prospective jurors called -- 500 people have been summoned to the Birmingham Sheraton, where they will fill out a questionnaire.
Court officials said they chose the hotel because only one federal courtroom in the city is large enough to hold that many prospective jurors and it is being used in another high-profile case.
Prospective jurors were sent home Wednesday after filling out the forms. A smaller number will be called back to federal court in mid-May to be individually questioned about the case by U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith and attorneys for the prosecution and defense.
In mid-May, a number of those prospective jurors will be brought back to federal court, where they will be individually questioned about the case by Judge Lynwood Smith and attorneys for the prosecution and defense.
It could take between two to three weeks beyond that to seat a jury, according to court officials.
Although the questions won't be made public until a jury is seated, Smith has indicated he wanted the questionnaire modeled after the one used in the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The tentative date for opening statements is June 9, according to federal court officials.
Attorneys on both sides of the case have already been fighting over the forensic evidence. Defense attorneys spent much of last week arguing before Smith that bomb reconstructions should be excluded.
Smith has not yet ruled on their request.
Prosecutors have laid out some of their case in a series of court documents.
Prosecutors say they will prove that on the morning of January 29, 1998, the 38-year-old Rudolph deliberately planted a bomb disguised as a flowerpot in front of the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic.
When Robert Sanderson, an off-duty Birmingham police officer working as a security guard at the clinic, apparently discovered the device, they will argue, Rudolph used a remote control to detonate the bomb.
Sanderson, 35, died in the blast. Nurse Emily Lyons, who was 41 at the time, was wounded.
The prosecution will also offer testimony from two witnesses it says will place Rudolph in Birmingham the day of the bombing.
One of the witnesses, a medical student, has told investigators that he saw a man leaving the scene of the explosion. He followed the man and later was able to write down a license plate number when the man got in a gray Nissan pickup truck.
The truck was later traced to Rudolph, but he disappeared from his home in Murphy, North Carolina. Rudolph eluded federal authorities for more than five years before his arrest May 31, 2003.
The defense says it will offer its own explanation of why Rudolph became a fugitive, saying it had nothing to do with guilt.
