LAKEPORT – Stuart Hanlon, defense counsel for a young San Francisco man who will stand trial for murder, put his case for a change of venue in the hands of two experts on Tuesday in Lake County Superior Court.

Judge Arthur Mann's decision on the matter, however, will not be known until today after final arguments on the issue by Hanlon and District Attorney Jon Hopkins.

Craig Haney and Bryan A. Stevenson, each a man of letters and significant courtroom exposure, were the two experts whom Hanlon summoned in his efforts to move the trial of Renato Hughes Jr. out of Lake County.

Hughes is charged with the deaths of companions Rashad Williams and Christian Foster, which occurred during an alleged break-in and attempted robbery of marijuana from Shannon Edmonds at his home in Clearlake Park on Dec. 7, 2005.

The District Attorney's Office filed the murder by accomplice charges against Hughes even though it was Edmonds who allegedly shot and killed Foster and Williams, under a law that holds perpetrators of a felony liable if the felony is apt to result in a lethal response.

Both Haney and Stevenson agreed with Hanlon that Hughes, who is black, could not be tried fairly in a court in Lake County, which Hanlon claims is only two 2 percent black.

Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, an NYU professor, a lecturer on civil rights in the justice system and author, asserted essentially that Lake County's predominantly white population dictates against Hughes receiving a fair trial here.

"The presumption of guilt is going to emerge just by seeing this man (Hughes) at that table," said Stevenson, who is also black, as he gestured toward the defense table where Hughes sat.

Leaning heavily on the term "unconscious bias," Stevenson, who refrained from calling Lake County a "racist" area. But he said that holding the trial here would be "risky," and that Hughes' chances of getting a fair trial here would be "unlikely."

Haney, who is white, backed his opinion with a study of pretrial publicity. He said he had been studying accounts of the case since early summer.

Both men cited the absence of the word "alleged" in publicity about the case and Stevenson took exception to the words "home invasion" used in some newspaper accounts of the case, which he said are "unfair and very inflammatory." Burglary, he said, is a word that should have been used.

Haney, meantime, said, "My opinion is he (Hughes) could not get a fair trial trial."

Haney, a University of California professor who said he had both a PhD in psychology and a law degree, described how he had used a six-point California change of venue critique for deciding that Lake County would be an inappropriate trial venue for a black man accused of a serious crime.

The critique included: nature and gravity of the offense, nature and amount of publicity, status of the victim, status of the defendant, size of the community and racial overtones. Haney said Lake County probably would fit all six critique points.

To emphasize his point about pretrial publicity, Haney showed examples of articles on a screen after getting a favorable ruling from Mann, who overruled Hopkins' objection that doing so would be "not only unnecessary but unfair." Haney called the articles "classic change of venue material."

Haney also revealed the results of a J.D. Franz Research Inc. random digit dialing phone survey of 427 respondents. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents, said Haney, said that Hughes should be tried for murder and 85 percent, he added, said they believed there had been a home invasion.

However, he did not explain how only about 50 percent of the respondents who said they had read about the trial squared with his charge of pretrial publicity influencing the case. That will likely be a point that Hopkins will allude to during his cross examination of Haney, which was to be the first order in the proceedings this morning.

Hopkins also criticized Hanlon for turning over two large binders of material that Hanlon and his witnesses relied upon until Tuesday. Standard procedure, he said, is to provide such material well in advance.

The motion hearing was attended by representatives of the U.S. Justice Department, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the county Grand Jury, which has been asked to examine the case from a civil rights standpoint by Hughes' family and supporters.

E-mail John Lindblom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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