A change of venue is the
legal term for moving a
trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a
jury trial away from a location where a fair and
impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread
publicity about a crime and its
defendants to another community in order to obtain
jurors who can be more objective in their duties. This change may be to different towns, and across the other sides of states or, in some extremely high-profile
federal cases, to other states.
In
law, the word
venue designates the location where a
trial will be held. It derives from the
Latin word for "a place where people gather."
Notwithstanding its use in high-profile cases, a change of venue is more typically sought when a defendant believes that the
plaintiff's selected venue is either improper or less appropriate than another venue. A change of venue request because venue is improper means that the removing defendant believes that the case may not be in that venue because it is improper under procedural rules. A change of venue request can also be made if the defendant believes there is a more appropriate venue – called
forum non conveniens – even if the current venue is proper under the
procedural rules. In these cases, the trial judge is given great deference in most
jurisdictions by
appellate courts in making the decision as to whether there is a more appropriate venue.
A change of venue may be reflected in the formal language used in a trial. For example, in California, when a
bailiff or
marshal calls the court to order part of the cry will take the form "in and for the County of San Francisco"; when there is a change of venue the cry will be, "in the County of Alameda for the County of San Francisco."
The sensational 1844 trial of Polly Bodine, who was accused of murdering her husband's sister and niece and setting fire to their house, a case commented on by
Edgar Allan Poe and
P. T. Barnum, among others, was held on
Staten Island in New York. The packed trial resulted in a hung jury and then an early case of change of venue, the retrial moved first to
Manhattan, which resulted in a conviction, later overturned, and then to
Newburgh, New York, where Bodine was acquitted.[1]
The 1930s trial of the three
Plaid Cymru defendants charged with
arson of an RAF bombing school in
Penyberth was controversially moved to the
Old Bailey as the local population in Penyberth were highly sympathetic towards the defendants.
The 1995 double murder criminal trial of
O.J. Simpson for the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, in which the court granted a change of venue, and ordered the case to be moved from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles.
In 1996, the murder trial for
Bernie Tiede had its venue changed from
Carthage, Texas on the concern that the defendant was so popular in that community that a jury there would be unavoidably and unfairly biased in his favor.[2]
The
Amadou Diallo murder case in 1999, in which the
NYPD defendants' trial was moved to
Albany.
The 2004 trial of
Scott Peterson was moved from
Stanislaus County to
San Mateo County amid concerns that Peterson would not be able to receive a fair trial due to the heavy amount of publicity the trial had generated.[3]
While the 2006 trial of Perry March in the
murder of his wife ten years earlier was held in
Nashville, where the crime had occurred, the defense won a motion to have the jury selected from the pool in
Chattanooga. The jurors were bused to Nashville and housed in a hotel for the duration of the trial, like the 1980 busing of jurors in
John Wayne Gacy's murder trial in
Illinois where its jurors were bused from
Rockford to
Cook County.
The trial of Christian Bahena Rivera (the murder suspect of
Mollie Tibbetts) was moved from
Poweshiek County to
Woodbury County in 2019 due to the latter having a greater amount of Spanish-speaking jurors.
References
^Robert Pigott. New York's Legal Landmarks: A Guide to Legal Edifices, Institutions, Lore, History, and Curiosities on the City's Streets, New York: Attorney Street Editions (2014), p. 170.
ISBN978-0-61599-283-9