Attorneys agree: No video copy
Attorneys came to an agreement Wednesday that will prevent copies from being made of pornographic videos that Joseph Edward Duncan allegedly made as he held Dylan and Shasta Groene at a remote Montana campsite.
A court hearing was scheduled Wednesday on a motion by Prosecutor Bill Douglas, asking 1st District Judge Fred Gibler to reconsider an Oct. 19 ruling that the videos be copied for Duncan’s defense team. Douglas had asked that Gibler watch the videos before making a decision.
Douglas wouldn’t say whether Gibler watched the videos Wednesday, but when attorneys emerged from the judge’s chambers they had reached a compromise: The videos will not be copied.
Douglas withdrew his motion, saying his office would accommodate requests by Duncan’s attorneys to privately view the videos.
“Any place in the world, at any time, we will provide access to that material,” Douglas said. The prosecutor also agreed not to introduce the videos as evidence at any point in the trial or during the penalty phase if Duncan is convicted.
Douglas is seeking the death penalty for Duncan, who has been charged with the May deaths of Brenda Groene, her boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, and Groene’s 13-year-old son, Slade.
Public Defender John Adams said he believed both sides had reached a “reasonable resolution.” Adams said his decision not to press for copies had nothing to do with the fact that Duncan’s federal public defender this week voiced concerns over Adams’ insistence that the videos be copied.
“We don’t want to cause the McKenzie family or the Groene family any more hardship,” Adams said Wednesday.
An attorney for Steve and Shasta Groene said he believed the agreement “was an appropriate resolution.”
Chuck Lempesis said he attended Wednesday’s hearing at the request of Steve Groene.
“Steve’s had very strong feelings over whether those videos should be copied,” Lempesis said. “We sometimes forget there’s a lot of victims in this case, and Steve Groene is one of them.”
At Wednesday’s hearing, Adams told the judge he would be filing a motion to extend the deadline for filing pretrial motions. He said his office received thousands of pages of discovery during the past week alone, and several CDs and DVDs of evidence.
Adams said there wasn’t a rational relationship from one page to the next and that his office was basically taking the books of evidence apart to try and make sense of the documents and then reorganize them.
“It’s like someone took a deck of cards (and) threw them up in the air,” he said.
The deadline for pretrial motions is Nov. 30.
Adams declined to comment Wednesday on the likelihood of a plea agreement or any request for a change of venue for the trial, scheduled to begin in January.
Once the state’s case against Duncan wraps up, federal prosecutors are expected to file charges against him for the kidnapping of Dylan and Shasta Groene, Dylan’s murder and production of child pornography.