OAKLAND — Yusuf Bey IV and Antoine Mackey are entitled to have their triple murder trial moved out of Alameda County because 70 percent of potential jurors familiar with charges against them think they are definitely or probably guilty, an expert testified Wednesday.
“There is a reasonable likelihood the defendants would not receive a fair trial,” Bryan Edelman, a social psychologist, said on the second day of a change-of-venue hearing before Superior Court Judge Thomas Reardon.
In Los Angeles County — where the two want Reardon to move the trial — only 41 percent of the potential jurors think the defendants are definitely or probably guilty, Edelman said. He said he was paid $30,000 to poll potential jurors and $175 an hour to testify for the defendants.
Bey is charged with ordering Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey and two other men killed in the summer of 2007. Mackey is charged with killing one of those men, Michael Wills, and helping confessed killer Devaughndre Broussard fatally shoot Bailey and a third victim, Odell Roberson.
Broussard told a grand jury last year that Bey IV, the former leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, ordered him to kill Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about financial and internal turmoil in the bakery and the Bey family.
Edelman said that intense media coverage — largely by a coalition of journalists working as The Chauncey Bailey Project — published or aired hundreds of reports about the killings and the Beys, saturating potential jurors with impressions that the defendants are guilty.
The judge, who on Tuesday said Edleman was using “bad math” to inflate the number of newspaper stories published about Bey IV in the past 36 months, seemed to remain skeptical Wednesday.
When Edelman said, “There are specific factors in this case that won’t follow it” to another county, Reardon seemed doubtful.
The fact that prosecutors say Bailey was killed because he was a reporter working on a story about the bakery “would land just as hard in another county as it would here,” the judge said.
The hearing is scheduled to continue this morning.
Contact Thomas Peele at tpeele@bayareanewsgroup.com. To learn more about the killing of Chauncey Bailey, go to ChaunceyBaileyProject.org.
