Appeals court to hear Dru Sjodin case

FARGO, N.D. (AP) - Attorneys for Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. likely will focus their appeal of his death sentence on jury selection, closing arguments and the location of his trial for the killing of university student Dru Sjodin, the prosecutor says.

Rodriguez, a convicted sex offender from Crookston, is awaiting execution for the 2003 kidnapping and murder of the 22-year-old University of North Dakota student. Three judges from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals are scheduled to hear his appeal Thursday in St. Paul.

Each side will have 30 minutes to boil down hundreds of pages of documents filed in the appeal.

"If someone were to drop in from Mars and start watching these arguments, they wouldn't have a sense of the trial," U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley, lead prosecutor in the case, said Wednesday.

Defense attorney Richard Ney, a death penalty specialist from Wichita, Kan., said he would not comment before Thursday's hearing.

Sjodin, of Pequot Lakes, was abducted from the parking lot of a Grand Forks shopping mall in November 2003. Her body was discovered in a ravine near Crookston the following April. Authorities said she had been raped, beaten and stabbed.

Defense attorneys argued repeatedly that Hispanics and blacks were not adequately represented in the jury pool, and said the trial should have been moved to Minnesota.

"The jury ultimately chosen to determine Mr. Rodriguez' guilt and his fate came from a community which held a deep-seated prejudice against Mr. Rodriguez for more than two years," defense attorneys wrote.

Prosecutors said any doubts about a fair trial were resolved by an expanded jury pool and lengthy one-on-one interviews with potential jurors.

Defense attorneys also complained about Wrigley's closing arguments, claiming he made improper statements. Ney objected dozens of times during Wrigley's speech, including one time when the prosecutor referred to a defense scenario as nothing more than a "lawyerly verbal cartoon."

"There was a conscious and consistent effort throughout its arguments to obtain an unfair advantage and prejudice Mr. Rodriguez," Rodriguez's attorneys wrote. "It most certainly was not isolated, poor choices of words, as the government claims."

U.S. District Judge Ralph Erickson, who presided over the trial, ruled some of Wrigley's arguments may have been improper, but said that had "minimal force and almost certainly no effect" on the guilty verdict.

Wrigley said it's typical for the appeals panel to rule on death penalty cases within five or six months. That will likely be followed by more legal action, he said.

"This is an important next step," he said of Thursday's hearing. "But it is by no means the last step."