Jury Selection Starts Today in ‘Night Stalker’ Trial

Nearly three years after an arrest was made, 70 men and women will be summoned into the courtroom of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan this afternoon, the first of what could be up to 2,000 prospective jurors in the murder trial of accused ‘Night Stalker’ Richard Ramirez.

Barring a last-minute court intervention, the Texas drifter accused of being the sadistic intruder responsible for 14 serial murders in California will finally go on trial.

Watching today’s proceedings will be Ramirez--tall, thin, sporting shoulder-length black hair, teeth ravaged by decay, and a pallor resulting from his lengthy incarceration.

He will not be wearing the blue jail jumpsuit and shackles he has worn in dozens of previous court appearances. Criminal defendants are entitled to wear street clothes at their trials so jurors will not be influenced by seeing jail garb.

Ramirez, 28, a self-proclaimed devil worshiper from El Paso, will be tried for 13 murders and 30 other felonies--including attempted murder, burglary, robbery, rape and sodomy. He will be tried separately on a 14th murder count in San Francisco and for an attempted murder and sexual assault in Orange County.

The charges stem from a series of terrifying, nighttime assaults in 1984 and 1985 in which sleeping Los Angeles-area residents were attacked by a vicious intruder police and news reporters dubbed the Night Stalker.

The murder victims were shot, some in the head, at close range, bludgeoned or stabbed. Several women were raped. Some children were molested. One victim’s eyes were gouged out.

If convicted, Ramirez could be sentenced to death. He has remained, without bail, in a one-man cell at the Los Angeles County Jail since he was arrested in East Los Angeles on Aug. 31, 1985. He was rescued by police from angry residents, who had recognized him from a drawing of the Night Stalker suspect.

The first step in jury selection will be to find people who can “afford to stick around on this case for two years,” Tynan said this week.

Potential jurors who make it through the first part of the process will be asked by lawyers for both sides what they know of the case from news reports and whether they could disregard publicity and reach a verdict only on the basis of trial testimony.

More questioning will follow to determine how each potential juror feels about the death penalty.

Finally, the remaining candidates will be closely questioned about their backgrounds and attitudes. Each side will be able to summarily disqualify up to 20 potential panel members and as many others as the lawyers can persuade Tynan are unfit.

Defense attorneys and prosecutors, who have agreed on little in years of courtroom bickering, predict that a jury, and a dozen alternates, probably will not be seated until 1989.

Verdicts are not expected until sometime in the next decade.

Defense attorneys Daniel Hernandez and Arturo Hernandez, whose maneuvers accounted for the delay in the start of the trial, would have liked even more time to prepare their case. The trial could still be delayed if state appellate courts grant pending requests by the defense attorneys, who have never disclosed what strategy they will use.

The Hernandezes, who are not related and who have never tried a capital case, asked the higher court to overturn another judge’s refusal to remove Tynan from presiding at the trial. They say he is biased against the defense.

The defense team also has asked an appellate court to order changes in the jury-selection process to permit inclusion of more young Latinos.

Once the jury-selection phase is over, Deputy Dist. Attys. Philip Halpin and Alan Yochelson will lay out a collection of evidence against Ramirez, including eyewitness accounts, fingerprints, scientific and ballistics analysis and the defendant’s own statements.