In an Athens, Ga.., courtroom Friday, prosecutors were scheduled to begin zooming in on the harrowing details of a violent encounter that became a flashpoint in the debate over immigration after investigators said the perpetrator was an undocumented immigrant, the New York Times reports. Charged in the February killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student whose body was found along a wooded trail on the University of Georgia campus, is Jose Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela. Ibarra was arrested on Feb. 22, the day after the attack, and has remained in custody without bail. He has pleaded not guilty to the array of charges he faces, including malice murder and aggravated assault.
On Tuesday, the day before jury selection was scheduled to start, Judge H. Patrick Haggard of State Superior Court agreed to a request by Ibarra’s lawyers to hold a bench trial instead of trying the case to a jury. The request came after his lawyers tried unsuccessfully to move the trial out of Athens and to keep certain evidence from being presented to jurors. Ibarra was arrested by the Border Patrol when he entered the country illegally in 2022, near El Paso, Texas. He was released with temporary permission to stay in the country. He was later arrested again, this time in New York, for driving a scooter without a license and with a child who was not wearing a helmet, officials said. Last year, he was arrested in Georgia in connection with a shoplifting case and was released. Republican lawmakers cited the case as they pursued legislation aimed at tightening Georgia’s already strict immigration laws. In May, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a law requiring local law enforcement agencies to scrutinize the immigration status of people in their custody and to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Last week, voters in Athens and the surrounding region ousted Deborah Gonzalez, the district attorney whose office is handling the prosecution. She was elected in 2020 as a progressive prosecutor who had ambitions of overhauling the office, but she quickly became a polarizing figure. In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly drew attention to the case, condemning Mr. Ibarra as a “monster.”
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