Jury selected for 2nd Baby Grace trial

GALVESTON, Texas -- The jury has been selected for the second Baby Grace trial.

Tuesday afternoon prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed on a panel of nine men and three women who will decide the fate of Royce Clyde Zeigler II. Opening arguments are scheduled for 9 a.m. Wednesday.

Earlier on Tuesday, a group of 179 potential jurors gathered in the first-floor jury room of the Galveston County Courthouse to find out if they will be chosen for the second Baby Grace trial.

Zeigler, 26, is charged with capital murder in the death of his step-daughter, Riley Ann Sawyers. Kimberly Dawn Trenor, 21, the girl’s mother, was convicted February 2 of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Zeigler faces the same sentence if convicted.

The body of the 2-year-old girl was found inside a plastic box washed up on an island in Galveston’s West Bay in October of 2007. Trenor confessed she and Zeigler killed Riley during a punishment session that she claimed got out of control on July 25, 2007. Trenor said they hid Riley’s body inside a shed at Zeigler’s home in Spring for more than a month before trying to dispose of the evidence by placing the box with Riley’s body in the water near the Galveston Causeway.

Riley had been dead for nearly three months when she was found. A police artist sketch of the girl investigators dubbed "Baby Grace" was published nationwide. The photo and news coverage prompted Riley’s grandmother in Ohio, Sheryl Sawyers, to contact authorities. She had become concerned when Trenor refused to tell her where to find Riley.

Trenor’s trial lasted only one week, and the jury deliberated for just 90 minutes. Zeigler’s attorneys have suggested his trial could be much longer. Trenor’s trial included her 4-hour videotaped confession, where she told investigators she and Zeigler killed and disposed of Riley together. Zeigler’s attorneys suggested immediately after Trenor’s trial they will try to prove that only Trenor is responsible for the girl’s death.

During jury selection Tuesday, a total of 21 potential jurors told Judge David Garner that they could not be impartial and had already made up their mind about Zeigler’s guilt or innocence. They were dismissed. A jury of 12 with 2 alternates is expected to be chosen by the end of Tuesday’s proceedings, with the trial beginning Wednesday morning.

Prosecutors, with the consent of the Sawyers family in Ohio, agreed very early in the process not to seek the death penalty for either Trenor or Zeigler.

That decision hinged on what happened to a woman named Kenisha Berry.

Berry was sentenced to death in Beaumont in 2004 for killing her own infant and throwing the child in a dumpster. But in September 2007 the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals overturned her death sentence. There had to be proof that she was a continuing threat to society in order for the death sentence to be imposed. Prosecutors were only able to prove that she was a threat to her own children.

That precedent guided Galveston District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk in his decision that the correct sentence to seek for Zeigler and Trenor would be life in prison without parole.

"I promise you, if emotions and just the brutality of the crime were the deciding factors, the controlling factors in reaching the decision whether or not we were going to seek the death penalty, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today, " Sistrunk told 11 News in April of 2008.

Riley’s grandmother in Ohio agreed with the decision and tells 11 News she still does. "The death penalty would be too easy a punishment," Sheryl Sawyers’ attorney said in a written statement prior to Trenor’s trial. "They would prefer that both of them spend the rest of their days looking over their shoulders wondering if someone was going to attack them and spend their nights hearing Riley’s terrified screams over and over."