Kristin Smart murder trial should stay in SLO County, DA’s Office says. Here’s why
The San Luis Obispo District Attorney’s Office filed a brief Friday arguing the Kristin Smart murder trial should stay in San Luis Obispo County.
The 65-page filing comes in response to the change-of-venue motion filed by lawyers for Paul and Ruben Flores earlier this month, which said the two could not receive a fair trial in SLO County because of pretrial publicity.
Paul Flores is alleged to have killed Kristin Smart after an off-campus Cal Poly party in May 1996, and Ruben Flores, Paul Flores’ father, is charged with accessory after the fact, accused of helping his son hide Smart’s body. The two were arrested in April 2021 — 25 years after Smart’s disappearance. Smart’s body has never been found.
The prosecution claims the Flores team’s motion did not meet the criteria to warrant a new location for the trial.
Five factors are evaluated when a judge considers changing a trial’s venue: the nature and gravity of the offense, the nature and extent of the news coverage, the size of the community, the status of the defendant in the community, and the popularity and prominence of the victim.
News coverage was factual, DA says
The largest section of the district attorney’s opposition was dedicated to examining the nature and extent of news coverage, and how that may affect the prospective jury pool.
The filing notes that the Flores motion did not provide any concrete evidence of the effect of news coverage on a jury pool.
In most change-of-venue motions, the defense will poll prospective jurors in the community about their familiarity and opinions of a case in order to provide evidence that may back up their claim that a defendant will not receive a fair trial in a certain community. The Flores motion did not include any such data.
News coverage and publicity of Smart’s disappearance and the investigation that followed was also largely factual, the prosecution said. It added that news coverage reported at the preliminary hearings was on evidence that will be shown at trial and did not include inflammatory language toward Paul Flores.
Of the 99 exhibits the defense included in its motion — which included news articles, photos of billboards and bumper stickers, and a website — 22 did not include Paul Flores’ name at all, the prosecution said. Additionally, the 30-minute interview KSBY aired with Susan Flores, Paul Flores’ mother, where she maintained her son’s innocence was “curiously absent” from the motion.
“The nature of the news coverage in this case has been neutral, factual, and has related information that will be presented to jurors at trial,” the prosecution said.
It added that no horrific details of injuries have been released to prospective jurors because Smart’s body has never been found.
The prosecution noted that there was more news coverage around significant events in the case with little coverage in between, and that only four of the exhibits the defense referenced were published in the past six months.
The pretrial publicity in this case is not geographically centered in San Luis Obispo County either, the prosecution said, nodding to coverage from national programs like “48 hours.” It also said many of the national broadcasts were aired a year or longer before April 25, the current trial date.
When it comes to the Your Own Backyard podcast, the most recent episode came out in July 2021 — nine months before the trial date — so the effects of it should be diluted, the prosecution argued. The podcast was also the most-listened-to Apple podcast in the nation on April 21, 2021, while “Kristin Smart” was the seventh-most-searched phrase on Google on April 13, 2021, so the effects would be felt in any California county, the prosecution said.
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Trial should stay in SLO County unless jury selection proves otherwise, prosecution says
San Luis Obispo County is a moderately sized county, the prosecution said, with a population of 282,000 people, according to the most recent Census data. The county has also denied change-of-venue motions when it was much smaller, as it did in the 1988 case of Dennis Webb.
The prosecution also said the nature and gravity of the offense alone does not merit a new trial location, and notes that most cases that have had trials in a different county have been death penalty cases or cases involving multiple murders. In this case, Paul Flores has been charged with a single murder and Ruben Flores with accessory after the fact.
Neither Paul Flores or Kristin Smart were well-known in the San Luis Obispo County community until after the crime occurred, so their prominence in the community does not warrant a change of venue, the prosecution said.
“Many serious offenses are likely to engender sympathy for the victims no matter where the trial was held, and this stems from the nature of the crime and not the location of the trial,” the prosecution said in the filing. “The murder of a college freshman by another student in the course of a rape or attempted rape is likely to evoke sympathy, but that sympathy is not unique to San Luis Obispo County.”
Any evidence to support Paul Flores being a “pariah” in SLO County, as the defense claims, happened after the alleged crime, the filing said. The evidence provided by the defense were “isolated anecdotes unattributed to individuals” and the court has no way of knowing if the anecdotes are true, and if they were committed by individuals who are residents of SLO County.
The prosecution asks the judge to deny the change-of-venue motion, and to revisit it only if the process of voir dire, the questioning of potential jurors, shows an impartial jury cannot be found. It again refers to the lack of hard evidence that shows impartial jurors cannot be found, and said the court can revisit the issue if the defense were to file a new motion.
The trial is scheduled to begin April 25, but if the change-of-venue motion is granted, it could delay the case for months, potentially up to a year.
The Tribune identified just three other cases in SLO County where a criminal court trial did move, with the most recent being convicted murderer Rex Krebs’ trial in 2001.
The change-of-venue hearing is scheduled for March 30.
This story was originally published March 22, 2022 at 10:04 AM.
