Federal prosecutors will call 90 witnesses over the coming weeks to show why Joseph Duncan should die for his 2005 crimes. Those witnesses, however, won’t include Duncan’s only surviving victim, 11-year-old Shasta Groene. Instead, Duncan and prosecutors filed an agreement with the court late Wednesday…
A stipulation just filed on the court docket between Joseph Duncan and federal prosecutors clears Shasta Groene from having to testify against Duncan, and Duncan waives his right to have her testify or to cross-examine her. Instead, he’s agreeing to allow introduction, without objection, of…
Among the revelations in the prosecution’s opening statement: Duncan told the two children he’d kidnapped all about the terrible things he’d done, including how he’d killed their older brother, mother and mother’s fiancé. Court documents earlier revealed that Duncan told Shasta that he’d killed other…
Admitted killer Joseph Duncan just gave a very short opening statement – just a minute or two – in which he said, “I debated whether or not to do an opening statement, simply because I don’t want to get into an argument with the government…
Jurors frowned, pursed their lips, some reddened visibly and one gasped audibly as U.S. Attorney Tom Moss detailed the horrific tale of Joseph Duncan’s crimes, intricately planned out in every detail in advance, culminating in the sexual torture and murder of a 9-year-old boy and…
It’s still an open question as to whether Joseph Duncan will deliver an opening statement in his sentencing trial today, but so far, Duncan has been taking an active role in his own defense. When the two sides exercised peremptory challenges to winnow down the…
The process of exercising peremptory challenges and getting the jury down to 12 jurors plus three alternates went more quickly than Judge Lodge anticipated this morning, but he announced that he’d like to wait until 1:30 for the opening statements to start. He excused the…
The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has rejected an appeal from The Spokesman-Review of a federal judge’s decision to close the courtroom for key testimony in Joseph Duncan’s federal sentencing trial. A three-judge panel of the court wrote that it could not reverse U.S.…
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