Jury selection will begin Monday in A.J. Armstrong’s third capital murder trial.
Armstrong, now 23 and a father himself, is accused of killing his parents in their southwest Houston home seven years go, when he was just 16 years old.
But the trial won’t start immediately.
Jury selection is expected to take three to four weeks with the trial set to start on June 1.
It’s the third time in nearly seven years that prosecutors will seek to prove to a jury that Armstrong killed his parents. Armstrong has maintained his innocence.
Jury selection is expected to move forward despite a motion filed by Armstrong’s team last Thursday, claiming they needed more time to “question (a) juror from the second trial regarding a dating relationship with a Harris County prosecutor.”
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office responded to that motion by filing its own strongly-worded motion on Friday seeking a continuance.
The DA’s office criticized the timing of the defense request, writing that the State has been “unfairly prejudiced at the present time” because of media coverage.
Sources familiar with the Armstrong case tell reporters that said juror briefly dated a Harris County prosecutor who has no connection to the Armstrong case. We’re also told she was an alternate juror who was not involved in deliberations.
Defense attorney Rick DeToto offered no comment but his motion reads: “By withholding this information from the defense during trial, the right to a fair trial was denied.”
The District Attorney’s office also declined to comment. Due to the publicity of the case, Judge Kelli Johnson has warned attorneys on both sides not to make statements to the media that could “harm the judicial process.”
It’s been more than six months since the retrial ended in no verdict.
In July 2016, Dawn and Antonio Sr. were each shot in the head, pillows placed over their faces, while asleep in their southwest Houston home. Armstrong was arrested hours later. He was 16 years old, entering his junior year of high school at the time.
Today, Armstrong is an adult, who has worn a GPS ankle monitor all his adult life, since bonding out of jail in 2017.
In March, court paperwork showed Armstrong violated a bond condition when the GPS tracker died for two and a half hours because he had failed to charge it.
Since his last trial, Armstrong has married the mother of his son, his high school girlfriend, Kate Ober, who testified on his behalf during his first trial. Big milestones for anyone, but Armstrong has yet to move on with his life, as investigators maintain he is the only person who could have killed his parents, which prosecutors will attempt to prove to a third jury.
There have been several delays in what seems like the never-ending saga that is the Armstrong case thanks to Hurricane Harvey, COVID, dozens of rescheduled hearings, even lost evidence. It has become one of the thousands of backlogged cases plaguing Harris County criminal courts.
While District Attorney Kim Ogg pointed out during a recent press conference the backlog has been reduced by about 21% since June 2021, we found when it comes to violent crime, the backlog continues to climb, specifically showing a lag in trying capital murder cases.
Comparing January 2021 to January 2022, data from the Texas Office of Court Administration shows amount of capital murder cases awaiting trial in Harris County increased by about 12%. Compare January 2022 to January 2023, and there’s about a 7% increase in pending capital murder cases.
But legal analyst Steve Shellist says you can’t compare the unprecedented Armstrong case with the backlog.
“If you were to average it out, it’s taken what, about two years to get to each trial? That’s not crazy,” Shellist said. “(That’s) not a long time to get to three trials.”
What is concerning, he says, is the cost, which doesn’t necessarily mean dollars.
“It is a cost that can’t be put into a calculator,” Shellist said. “(Prosecutors) could be working on other cases. These are very high level prosecutors. There are other victims out there or victims’ families who are waiting on their cases and defendants who are waiting on cases. These prosecutors could be devoting their time to those cases.”