AnaTeresa, thank you for clarifying so many questions for us! It is truly appreciated.
You said above that usually prior convictions are not allowed to be admitted in another trial, which means, if I understand this correctly, the jury should not hear about it. But how do you make sure that they didn't? Do they just take people's word for it that they never heard of PC and CR before? This case was all over the news, was it not?
I'm glad to help!
What will happen is that the jury won't be asked directly about Chism's conviction in Colleen's case. Instead, during voire dire, the potential jury will be polled to see who has heard of Chism. There will be a series of questions asked by the judge to determine who has knowledge of his past crimes and who does not. The intention is to ideally find people who haven't heard of him or who vaguely know of him. The next best after that are people who have heard of him, but say they can still be impartial. Surprisingly, this tends to work. People usually take jury duty very seriously - those who feel they can't be impartial (for whatever reason, not just from having heard of the defendant) are honest. Those who feel they can be impartial are honest, too. If anyone has heard of his past crimes and say they wouldn't be able to be impartial, they are dismissed from the pool.
With a case that has a ton of media attention, if the defense believes it will be hard to find an impartial jury, it can file a motion for a change in venue to move the trial to somewhere with less media saturation. It's very difficult to get one of these motions granted, so it will be interesting to see if the defense files one in the second case.
Was Chism on medication during the 2nd attack?
What will his defense be for the second attack?
Does the same Judge from trail 1, hear trial 2?
Does Chism get new, court appointed lawyers for 2nd trial?
Does the verdict from first trial and info, released in the 2nd trial?
Thank you.
I don't know the answer to all your questions, but as to the judge/defense attorneys - Chism will very likely have the same attorneys for the second case. When a defendant has multiple cases, the court usually likes to keep the same court appointed attorney(s) on the case because they are most familiar with the facts, and their actions in one case won't harm the second, for example. It keeps things more streamlined and efficient, and is more likely to give a defendant the best defense. I can't speak for certainty in Massachusetts, but in Ohio, I often saw multiple criminal cases with the same defendant assigned to the same judge - again, for efficiency's sake.
I think it's too early to say what the defense will be for the second attack. The attorneys are going to have to take some time to evaluate how this trial went, and whatever plea offers are on the table before crafting a defense. I don't know if he was on medication or not during the second attack.
I explained above a little bit, and in this post as well, about the information from the first trial - short answer is probably not.
