LIHUE — A Fifth Circuit Court judge on Thursday determined that the case of a man accused of killing an elderly woman has not been publicized enough to warrant moving his trial to another island, ruling instead to question potential jurors more thoroughly than usual about their knowledge of the case.
Peter Grewer was arrested last year in connection with the death of his neighbor and landlord, Joellen Hartman, a retired school teacher who was found beaten and stabbed to death inside her home on Pune‘e Road in Omao.
Grewer, 63, is charged with second-degree murder and, if convicted, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. His trial was scheduled to start this month, but that date was pushed back to January during Thursday’s hearing at the request of Grewer’s attorney, state Deputy Public Defender Stephanie Char.
Char filed a motion last month asking the judge presiding over Grewer’s case to transfer the trial to another island on the grounds that pretrial publicity has unfairly prejudiced the Kauai population against Grewer, depriving him of his right to be judged by an unbiased jury of his peers.
Char argued in her motion for a change of venue that, “given the limited jury pool of this small island,” the prejudice against Grewer is so great that he “cannot obtain a fair and impartial trial in this circuit.”
In the motion, Char quoted multiple comments on social media and on The Garden Island’s website responding to articles about the case — this will be the sixth article TGI has published about Grewer since his arrest in June 2018 — implying Grewer suffers from mental health problems and drug addiction.
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Kimberly Torigoe said in an
opposing motion that the social
media posts and newspaper website comments were not necessarily made by people on Kauai, and argued that even if that were the case, “the amount of potential jurors that cannot remain fair and impartial are not so numerous that prejudice to defendant is so great to warrant a change of venue.”
Torigoe pointed out that only five out of 32,870 Kauai adults who read TGI felt compelled to comment on the newspaper articles about Grewer, concluding that “even if you assume that the individuals who left the comments cannot remain fair and impartial, it still leaves 32,865 Garden Island readers and 23,262 non-Garden Island readers available.”
She elected not to make any further argument beyond her written motion during Thursday’s hearing, as Char attempted to convince Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Randal Valenciano that numerous online comments calling Grewer “crazy, threatening, scary, dangerous,” had prejudiced the public to the point that the trial should be transferred to “any other circuit in the state of Hawaii.”
Valenciano remained unconvinced. He ruled to keep the trial in Fifth Circuit Court and said any potential pollution of the jury pool could be mitigated by conducting the jury-selection process in such a way that anyone biased by media exposure to the case could be weeded out through specific questioning.
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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.
