By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
This afternoon at the King County Courthouse, pre-testimony proceedings in the trial of Brandon Chaney and Bryce Huber are scheduled to resume.
Huber (left) and Chaney (right), are two of the four men who were charged with gunning down 26-year-old Steve Bushaw along California north of Edmunds in The Junction on Super Bowl night in 2009. The other two, Danny O’Neal and John Sylve, already have pleaded guilty. As mentioned earlier, we were in court as proceedings began Monday afternoon.
Toplines: The case has a new prosecutor, Jeff Baird, because the one originally assigned to the case, James Konat – who won the case against South Park killer/rapist Isaiah Kalebu earlier this summer – was taken off it amid a controversy over racist remarks he made in an unrelated case in which a conviction was overturned as a result. Baird gained fame last decade for leading the Green River Killer prosecution team. His first major announcement in this case: Seeking to drop the “conspiracy to commit murder” charge against Chaney and Huber.
Chaney’s lawyer James Rowe didn’t object, so his client now is on trial for one charge – 1st-degree murder with firearm enhancement – but Huber’s lawyer Anthony Savage did object, saying the alleged conspiracy was going to figure into his defense, and dropping the charge “disarms” him of a contention he planned to pursue. Judge Joan DuBuque gave Savage until first thing this morning to cite case law to support his argument against dropping the conspiracy charge.
She also suggested the defense lawyers would want to read the trial brief that Baird had turned in – hinting that it would raise a number of issues that might take days to hash out – and when court reconvenes today, everyone will have “a better sense of what there is to argue about.”
All that means this may not get to jury selection for a while.
The trial originally was set to start in January – then suddenly, Sylve and O’Neal pleaded guilty, and that led to delays. It was pushed further back when Konat was still on the case, so as not to conflict with the South Park murder/rapes trial. Even Judge DuBuque acknowledged yesterday, “This [Bushaw murder] case has been proceeding in a piecemeal fashion.”
It’s also a complicated case – and as noted again in court yesterday, evidence will include a copious amount of cell-phone records – with the general allegation that Bushaw was killed because Huber believed he had been involved in a home-invasion robbery; Sylve and O’Neal allegedly were the triggermen, and Chaney the getaway driver.
(Photo credit: January 2011, by Christopher Boffoli for WSB)
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