There is finally a date for the retrial of Ronald Weiss, the 73-year-old man charged with the murder of 16-year-old Barbara Bruzda of Tunnelton in October 0f 1978. Indiana County President Judge Thomas Bianco has ordered jury selection to begin on March 21st of next year. Bianco had originally ordered the trial to begin yesterday, but granted a defense request for a continuance.
In 1997, Weiss was convicted of killing Bruzda after playing pool with her in her family’s bar in Tunnelton. Her body was found five months later in a wooded area. Weiss was not convicted until 1997, after a state law had changed and allowed spouses to testify against each other. That made the testimony of Weiss’s common law wife admissible and along with the testimony of two prison inmates who said Weiss admitted killing Bruzda, a jury found him guilty.
But in 2018 federal judge Mark Hornack reversed the conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct by then-Deputy State Attorney General John Scott Robinette and a state trooper, who claimed the inmates were not promised special treatment in exchange for their testimony, when they clearly were. Hornack warned that a retrial could be barred because of double jeopardy, but Bianco eventually ruled that the prosecution’s misconduct and Weiss’s guilt or innocence were two separate issues. His ruling was upheld in State Superior Court.
Weiss remains in the Indiana County Jail. He was released from state prison when Hornack made his ruling in 2018, and was immediately re-arrested and jailed without the possibility of bond.
Comments