PARK CITY, Utah — The trial of Kouri Richins is on hold as the defense seeks an appeal to a decision denying their request to move the case from Summit County to Salt Lake County.
Richins is currently facing felony murder and homicide charges for allegedly poisoning her husband, Eric Richins, back in 2022. Back in March, the defense filed a motion to move the case to Salt Lake County, citing how the case garnered extensive media coverage, even at the national level.
Monday's hearing paid special attention to a pair of "case awareness" surveys conducted in both Summit and Salt Lake counties. One survey was conducted on behalf of the state's prosecutors, while the second survey was commissioned by the attorneys representing Richins.
The goal of both surveys was to determine whether or not prior media coverage of a case could cause potential jurors to come in with pre-conceived biases about the accused, potentially denying them the constitutional right to trial by an impartial jury.
Sunday evening, the defense filed an expert affidavit as a supplement to their motion that outlined and analyzed the findings of their survey, conducted by Dr. Bryan Edelman, Ph. D, and Ironwood Insights Group.
Edelman has served as an expert witness in a number of high-profile cases. In 2024, he conducted a similar survey on behalf of the defense team for Bryan Kohberger, who is currently being tried for the 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students.
Edelman was brought in to testify about the findings, outlining how high-profile media coverage could potentially poison the jury pool.
"People who know more information, have more case knowledge, are more likely to have bias," testified Edelman. "That's exactly what we find in our survey. We're finding consistent, predictive relationships... based on thirty-plus years of social science research."
On cross examination, state prosecutor Bradley Bloodworth took issue with Edelman's methodology of sampling media coverage. Edelman testified that the Summit County survey primarily sampled media coverage from The Park Record.
When pressed, he further testified that he did not include any coverage from local television coverage nor any coverage from national outlets, calling his findings a "conservative" analysis.
After hours of testimony and arguments, the judge ruled the difference in the potential pool of jurors between the two counties was negligible, due in part to how close they are to one another. He also cited the logistical hurdles that would come with either transporting Richins to and from Salt Lake County over the course of the trial, or having jurors commute from Salt Lake County to Summit County.
As soon as the denial was handed down, the defense filed a motion to stay the proceedings as they seek an interlocutory appeal. Prosecutors did not object, stating they remain prepared to take the case to trial.
