After years of legal maneuvering, jury selection is scheduled to begin at 8:30 tomorrow morning in Indiana County Court for the Ronald Weiss murder retrial.
The 78-year-old Weiss is accused of killing 16-year-old Barbara Bruzda after playing pool with her at her father’s tavern in Tunnelton in October of 1978. Her body was found buried beneath leaves the following February.
Weiss was found guilty of the crime in 1997 after state law changed to allow spouses to be witnesses against each other, allowing his common law wife to testify. But in 2018, a federal judge overturned the verdict based on misconduct by the state attorney general’s prosecutor and a state trooper who testified at the trial. The State Supreme Court subsequently ruled that Weiss could be retried because the crime and the prosecutorial misconduct were separate matters. There have been five attempts at retrial since then.
The latest pretrial matters settled by President Judge Thomas Bianco have been over the use of the testimony from the original trial, with the prosecution asking the judge to clarify his ruling on Thursday.
Five other trials were scheduled to get underway tomorrow as well, but they have either been pled out or continued.
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