Haun’s Lawyers Suggest Grand Jury Pressured

Diana Haun agreed Monday to postpone entering a plea to murder and kidnapping charges, as her lawyers questioned whether prosecutors pushed the Ventura County Grand Jury to indict her without fully investigating the slaying of Ventura mother Sherri Dally.

“The decision of the grand jury to indict Diana Haun on the eve of her preliminary hearing is disappointing,” said Deputy Public Defender Neil Quinn, reading from a prepared statement. “The timing of the indictment [Friday] suggests that it was intended to prevent the public preliminary hearing scheduled to begin today.

“We fear the grand jury may have been advised by the prosecutor that it was necessary to conclude their investigation by today’s date and that this indictment does therefore not reflect a full investigation of the facts,” Quinn said.

However, Chief Assistant Dist. Atty. Kevin J. McGee denied that. “I think they’re speculating out of thin air,” he said. “There’s no basis for that.”

Clad in a blue jail uniform, Haun appeared briefly Monday before Superior Court Judge Robert Bradley and agreed to waive her speedy-trial rights by postponing her arraignment until Sept. 12.

The delay will allow the case to proceed before Judge Frederick Jones, who is on vacation this week.

It also will give her lawyers more time to read grand jury transcripts and about 4,000 pages of other documents.

Bradley also sealed the transcripts of the two-week grand jury investigation and renewed a gag order forbidding attorneys in the case from publicly discussing the evidence in the Dally killing.

Sherri Dally’s body was found in a ravine north of Ventura on June 1, almost a month after she was abducted from the parking lot of a Ventura store. She had been bludgeoned to death and stabbed repeatedly.

Haun was indicted Friday on charges of kidnapping and first-degree murder with special circumstances that will allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty if she is convicted.

The indictment accuses Haun of bludgeoning Dally to death with “a hatchet or other bladed and blunt object or instrument” and of stabbing her with “a deadly and dangerous weapon, a knife, or other sharp cutting weapon.”

The indictment erased the need for prosecutors to present their evidence against Haun in public at a preliminary hearing, which had been scheduled for Monday morning.

Moments after Haun agreed Monday to wait to enter her plea before Jones, her attorney stepped outside the courtroom and read his statement to reporters, objecting to the grand jury proceeding.

Quinn’s remarks, made despite the gag order requested by his office, also alluded to statements made by Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Frawley, one of the prosecutors in the Haun case.

Frawley’s statements “that the evidence presented was sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, are false,” Quinn’s statement said.

Grand juries secretly hear only the prosecution’s evidence, Quinn said. “It is by nature only a screening device which is designed to determine if there exists probable cause or reasonable suspicion based upon the evidence to justify a trial,” he said. “An indictment is not a trial, and neither Diana Haun nor ourselves have knowledge of the evidence presented to the grand jury, or of the evidence not presented to the grand jury.”

Quinn’s statement concludes by asking the public to withhold judgment until all the evidence is heard, saying, “Ms. Haun remains presumed innocent in the eyes of the law.”

However, McGee dismissed Quinn’s statement as sour grapes.

“We’re not issuing any counterstatement,” he said. “As you know, it’s common practice for a murder case to be heard by the grand jury, and it’s common for the defense to be not happy about that because they are not allowed to be present.”