Indiana County President Judge Thomas Bianco will hold another status conference on Monday for the retrial of Ronald Weiss, the once-convicted man accused of murdering 16-year-old Barbara Bruzda of Tunnelton in 1978.
Weiss was found guilty of the killing in 1997 after state law changed to permit spouses to testify against each other. His common-law wife testified against him, as did two prison inmates who said Weiss admitted that he killed Bruzda after playing pool with her in her father’s bar. But a federal judge overturned the conviction in 2018 due to prosecutorial misconduct, ruling that a state attorney general’s office prosecutor and a state trooper had lied about promising special treatment for the inmates in exchange for their testimony.
After the State Supreme Court agreed with Bianco that the prosecutorial misconduct and Weiss’s guilt or innocence were two separate issues, there have been five attempts to re-try the 76-year-old . The last attempt was in November. Tomorrow’s conference will be the third since that time.
Comments