AP News, February 5th, 2007
A jury of 12 Norfolk Islanders was sworn in Monday for the tiny South Pacific island's first murder trial since it was settled 151 years ago by descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers.
New Zealander Glenn McNeill, a 29-year-old former cook on the island, pleaded not guilty in the Norfolk Island Supreme Court last week to killing Janelle Patton, a 28-year-old hotel dining room manager, in 2002.
Selecting the jury took more than five hours, as scores of potential jurors asked to be excused. More than a dozen told Chief Justice Mark Weinberg they knew either the defendant or the victim, or both. Others were connected, or even related, to possible witnesses in the trial.
The jury list was drawn from only 1,200 adults on the electoral roll of the 13-square-mile island, a territory of Australia about 1,180 miles northwest of Sydney.
"You would have had to be living on another planet not to have heard anything at all about this case before," Weinberg told the potential jurors.
Patton was the first person to be murdered on the island since 194 descendants of the Bounty mutineers arrived here in 1856. Queen Victoria granted them Norfolk Island after Pitcairn Island, their first sanctuary, grew overcrowded.
The British explorer Captain James Cook discovered Norfolk Island in 1774. The British established a penal colony here in 1788, but authorities eventually abandoned the use of the island as a prison.
Many of the island's 1,600 residents, the Web site norfolkisland.com.au notes, bear the surnames of mutineers _ including Christian, for Fletcher Christian, the leader of the mutiny. At least some descendants of the original colonists, the Web site says, can still speak a language that mixes 18th century English and Polynesian.
McNeill was arrested in February 2006 after he returned to New Zealand, following an unprecedented police investigation that included taking fingerprints from three quarters of Norfolk Island's population.
He faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Patton's stabbed and battered body was found partly wrapped in plastic in the bushes near a waterfall on March 31, 2002.
The court was set to be closed for legal argument Tuesday, with the jury scheduled to hear the prosecutor's opening statement on Wednesday.
