Apr 26, 2017 3 min read

A Washington County judge rejected a bid for a new trial by death row inmate Jordan Clemons, who alleged his conviction by an all-white jury violated his right to a jury of his peers.

Judge Gary Gilman said Clemons, who is black, “failed to show that under-representation of African-Americans in the jury array is due to systematic exclusion of the group.”

The question of the racial makeup of the jury pool was one of a litany of issues Clemons, 28, raised in a post-sentence motion challenging his first-degree murder conviction in the January 2012 slaying of his ex-girlfriend, Karissa Kunco.

Clemons sought to get his conviction overturned, a new trial or a modified sentence.

Among the other arguments Clemons made in his post-conviction motion were that a judge erred by denying Clemons’ request to move the trial to another county because of extensive pretrial publicity; the evidence presented at trial did not support a first-degree murder conviction; and photographs of Kunco taken after she was killed and following a previous assault should not have been shown to the jury.

Assistant Public Defender Charles Carpinelli, who represents Clemons, said the public defender’s office will file the automatic review with the state Supreme Court within 30 days of Gilman’s April 17 order.

“It all has to do with preserving the record,” Carpinelli said.

He said the issues will be part of the state Supreme Court’s review of his client’s case. The matter could have gone directly to the state’s highest court, but, procedurally, Clemons’ attorneys chose to first present the information to Gilman.

Washington County Court Administrator Patrick Grimm testified during a hearing before Gilman in December about the jury selection process, for which the county uses a software program called Jury Track.

The county initially selected 500 potential jurors at random using the program and sent them jury questionnaires. Of those, 208 people responded, Gilman wrote in his opinion.

Of those who responded, one person recorded their race as black and another person as Hispanic. Two others selected “other” on the form, and 10 didn’t provide information regarding their race.

The first 151 who returned jury questionnaires were summoned for jury selection.

Gilman noted in his order that the software “cannot be overridden to exclude persons from a certain geographic area within the county that may have a larger concentration of minority residents” and can’t “be programmed to exclude persons because they are from a minority class.”

Gilman also found Clemons had waived his right to object to the composition of the jury by waiting until his post-sentence motion.

Kunco, 21, a resident of Baldwin, Allegheny County, obtained a restraining order against Clemons from Allegheny County Court following a Dec. 18, 2011, assault that left her face bruised and misshapen.

Kunco was last seen alive Jan. 11, 2012, before she agreed to met Clemons that night after he threatened to kill himself, according to social media accounts shown in court during Clemons’ trial. State police alleged that after slitting her throat, Clemons dragged Kunco’s naked body into the woods in rural Washington County and covered it with leaves, brush and a tree stump. Two land surveyors found her the next morning, according to a summary of the case Gilman included in his opinion.

In 2015, Gov. Tom Wolf announced a moratorium on executions, citing concerns about innocence, racial bias and the death penalty’s effect on victims’ families.

Staff writer Barbara Miller contributed to this report.