On day two of jury selection, the Dalia Dippolito defense team is alarmed by the number of jurors who said they knew about the murder-for-hire case, whether from the "COPS" TV show it was featured on, or on the news.
Dozens of potential jurors admitted to seeing Dippolito as "guilty" after watching news coverage of her previous trial.
"She was tried by a jury of her peers, she was convicted and sentenced. It will take a lot to make me change my mind," said one juror.
"This has been a big story in this county for 7 years and you heard all the jurors yesterday, not all the jurors, you heard about 50 jurors yesterday, not only say that they knew about the Dalia Dippolito's case but they knew she had been convicted in the first trial," said Brian Claypool, Dalia Dippolito's defense attorney.
The defense team sees the risk of selecting a tainted jury. Dippolito's attorneys now want to file a motion to find jurers from a different county.
"We wanted to give the process a chance. We always felt like well maybe we can come in here, we’ll try to filter some of the jurors and maybe we could find a good, fair jury pool, so we wanted to see if the process could work," added Claypool.
Judge Glenn Kelley denied a motion to strike down the current jury panel and continued to interview jurors on day two. He will hear the motion for a change of venue when it's filed, but warned attorneys that they will have to travel to another county for jury selection and then sequester that jury in Palm Beach County if the case is still tried locally.
"We're hoping that by having the court consider this we can bring in some jurors in other counties that might not have the depth of knowledge that people do in the local areas," said Claypool.
The Boynton Beach woman is accused of a murder-for-hire plot against her husband in 2009 that made national headlines.
Dippolito was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but that verdict was overturned by a judge in Appellate Court.