Jury picked for Vanderbilt rape retrial of Cory Batey

CHATTANOOGA — A woman who works at Victoria’s Secret. A gospel singer who works in a funeral home. A  woman whose sister was sexually assaulted when she was young. A machinist who was arrested on a charge of aggravated assault. A retiree whose wife is a fingerprint examiner. A candy maker.

Those are six of the 14 people who will hear the trial of Cory Batey next week in Nashville. The jury was chosen in Chattanooga, a process that took about nine hours over two days and finished about 11 a.m. Thursday.

Batey is accused of five counts of aggravated rape and two counts of aggravated sexual battery. He and three other former Vanderbilt University football players have been charged in the assault of an unconscious female student in a dorm in June 2013. Prosecutors say Batey carried out five of those crimes and is responsible for the other two because he aided the others.

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The jurors will be bused from Chattanooga to Nashville on Sunday. Chattanooga residents were chosen because of intense media coverage of the first trial — when Batey and another ex-player, Brandon Vandenburg, were found guilty — in Nashville. A mistrial was declared in June.

Batey’s retrial is to begin Monday and could last about a week. Jurors will be sequestered in a hotel and will not be able to use their cellphones or laptops.

The jury is 10 men and four women. Two are alternates who will be chosen randomly and dismissed before deliberations.

The previous jury was eight women and four men.

Jim Todd, a Nashville defense lawyer and former prosecutor, said jury selection is like reading tea leaves, and it’s hard to predict whether the makeup of the jury could be beneficial to the state or defense. Todd is analyzing the case for The Tennessean.

“You pick people you hope are impartial and fair, but you also want to pick people you hope are receptive to your message,” he said. “I think the defense would hope that men would be more sympathetic to alcohol-induced mistakes and less sympathetic to the victim.”

Batey testified during the previous trial he was drunk and did not remember the alleged assault.

It could be, Todd said, that if more women were on the jury, they would have been sympathetic to the woman who prosecutors say was raped.

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Worrick Robinson, one of Batey’s attorneys, said he was disappointed by a lack of diversity in the jury pool. Of the first 50 jurors called into the courtroom, only a few were black. There is one black man on the jury; the first trial's jury included three African-Americans.

“I was very disappointed that it was not as diverse as the city of Chattanooga and the city of Nashville,” Robinson said.

In questioning potential jurors, Batey’s attorneys made sure each had no racial bias. Batey is black. The woman officials say was raped is white.

Three people were dismissed Thursday in the final rounds of jury selection. Of those one was a doctor who said he sympathized with victims of sexual assault, and another was a woman who said she could not watch graphic videos of the alleged rape that are key evidence in the case.

Prosecutors and Batey's defense team say the possible witnesses at the second trial are not substantially different than the first. But one of Batey's attorneys, Courtney Teasley, told media at the Hamilton County Courts Building that Batey's case is new because he's standing trial alone.

"You know, this is different," she said. "This is a different case. This is Mr. Batey and we are ready."

Reach Stacey Barchenger at 615-726-8968 or on Twitter @sbarchenger.