The capital murder trial for a Jones County couple charged in the death of a baby is being moved to Neshoba County in June.
Brandon Gardner
Attorneys for Brandon Gardner and Brooke Stringer cited “excessive and inflammatory” pretrial publicity and social-media threats against their clients in the motion for change of venue they filed in Jones County Circuit Court. Several Leader-Call articles were used as exhibits in the motions.
Brooke Stringer
They are accused in the death of Stringer’s 6-month-old daughter Rosalee, who died of “nonaccidental traumatic head injury,” according to medical reports.
Judge Dal Williamson ruled in favor of Stringer’s Hattiesburg attorney Tangi Carter — who had also filed a motion for Williamson to recuse himself from the case because of his past association with South Central Regional Medical Center as counsel. Williamson denied that motion, saying that he would give the defendants a fair trial despite his past representation of and his daughter’s current association with SCRMC.
Carter turned in 70 affidavits from residents asserting that Stringer would not be able to “receive a far or impartial trial in Jones County” because of public sentiment against her. That number of affidavits “far exceed the requirements” of Mississippi Code standards, which calls for “two or more credible persons” to assert that.
Prosecutors “offered no testimony of witnesses or witness affidavits to rebut the presumption ... That, coupled with the fact that this is a capital case with defendants on trial for their lives, and a large amount of media coverage, the Court finds that the motion should be granted.”
The trial — which is expected to take two weeks — is set to begin on Tuesday, June 20 at the Neshoba County courthouse in Philadelphia.
At least 300 prospective jurors will be summoned to the courthouse for consideration to serve on the jury in the case. There will be four alternate jurors in the case, according to an earlier motion by defense attorneys that the judge granted. But jurors will not be sequestered, as defense attorneys requested.
Carter and Gardner’s attorney Marcus Evans of Waynesboro filed more than 20 motions, but several of those were withdrawn after they learned that the Jones County District Attorney’s Office would not be seeking the death penalty. The defendants do face a maximum sentence of life in prison, if found guilty.
Gardner and Stringer were arrested in December 2021 and both have since posted $500,000 bond and been released from the Jones County Adult Detention Center. They were believed to be the first local capital-murder suspects to bond out of jail while awaiting trial, then-District Attorney Tony Buckley said at the time.
The defendants were charged in the October 2019 death of Rosalee, then 6 months old. The infant’s father was a foreign-exchange student from Germany. Gardner and Stringer now have a baby together.
The arrest took more than two years because investigators had to wait on medical evidence from the crime lab, they explained at the time. The manner of death was “homicide,” according to the medical examiner’s autopsy results, and the cause of death was “blunt-force trauma.”
Gardner and Stringer were the only people in the home with the baby at the time of her death, and their explanation of what happened “was not possible,” Assistant District Attorney Kristen Martin said at the time of the arrest.
The defendants were charged with capital murder because there was an underlying felony — child abuse.
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