For the first time in more than a year, there has been some movement in the murder trial of Ronald Weiss, the now-75-year-old man found guilty in 1997 of the 1979 murder of 16-year-old Barbara Bruzda of Tunnelton.
The trial was to have begun on October 24th of last year but was continued on a defense motion and has sat dormant since then, but Weiss now has a new advocate, the Philadelphia-based Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, which represents defendants who are subject to the death penalty.
In 2018, Weiss’s conviction was struck down by a federal judge due to prosecutorial misconduct by a deputy state attorney general and a state trooper. He was released and immediately re-arrested with the charges reinstated and with a subsequent ruling by Indiana County President Judge Thomas Bianco that the murder and the prosecutorial misconduct were separate issues.
On October 18th, attorney Marc Alan Bookman of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation joined Indiana attorney Malcolm Taylor Johnson on the defense team. The docketing statement from the Supreme Court arrived in Indiana County Common Pleas Court on October 20th.
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