Atwater will be tried in N.C., judge says

A judge decided the trial for one of the two men charged with killing former Student Body President Eve Carson can stay in North Carolina, dismissing an argument that unbiased jurors would be impossible to find.

During the last five months, Demario James Atwater’s defense attorneys submitted pages of evidence that Carson’s killing sparked enough media coverage to ensure that almost all North Carolina residents knew about the case, and that more than half of residents had already decided that Atwater, 23, was guilty.

But U.S. District Court Judge James Beaty said all the evidence of extensive media coverage only convinced him that potential jurors needed to be well-screened — not that the trial needed to move altogether.

In his denial of the defense’s request to move the trail, he wrote that mainstream media coverage of Carson’s killing on television and in newspapers was mostly factual.

The more prejudiced and inflammatory information came from passionate online reader comments or blogs, he wrote.

“There is no basis to conclude that the extreme views of a few, expressed anonymously online, possibly by individuals not even in this district, compel the conclusion that all of the potential jury pool will be prejudiced against the defendant,” Beaty wrote.

The trial will be held as originally planned in the N.C. Middle District court in Winston Salem, which is the court Orange County federal cases go to. It starts in less than three weeks — on May 3.

During the jury selection process, if it does prove to be impossible to find unbiased jurors, Beaty said he would reconsider the request to move the trial out of state.

But the court already has distributed hundreds of questionnaires to potential jurors in preparation for its selection process.

Based on a preliminary look at those questionnaires, the court thought it wouldn’t run into many problems, Beaty wrote.

As he awaits the federal trail, Atwater is also facing charges at the state level for first-degree kidnapping and first-degree murder, along with Lawrence Alvin Lovette, who is 19.

Prosecutors say on March 5, 2008, Atwater and Lovette kidnapped Carson from her home, drove her in her car to ATMs to withdraw $1,400, then shot her five times in a neighborhood off East Franklin Street.

There is no date yet for the state trial.

Atwater can receive a death penalty sentence if convicted in either state or federal court.

Lovette is not facing federal charges, and will not face the death penalty. He was a minor at the time of the crime and is not eligible.



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