The second-degree murder case against Robert Steven Wright, accused in the 1998 killing of Renée Sweeney, continues to be the court case at the forefront of media in 2020.
At the time for her death, Sweeney was a 23-year-old Laurentian University music student. She worked at the former adult video store on Paris Street. Wright was a teenager living in Sudbury at the time.
Much has developed in the case over the past year, with a five-week trial by jury scheduled to begin May 25, 2021.
In February, the Crown attorney’s office learned it had failed in its attempt to have Wright’s legal team of Berk Keaney and Michael Venturi removed from the case, citing a conflict of interest. A publication ban prevents details from being made public.
Still in February, Wright submitted a change-of-venue application to have the trial held in another Northern Ontario venue outside of Sudbury.
His lawyers argued it is not possible to have an impartial jury in the northeast due to the widespread dissemination of information in the media and the public reaction to that information, both before and after Wright’s arrest in December 2018.
The extent of the pre-trial publicity in this case is exceptional, and Wright’s defence argued that media coverage has been consistent over the nearly 22 years since Sweeney was killed.
In October, Superior Court Justice Gregory Ellies rejected that application.
“I am not persuaded that a story or two per year about the killing over those 17 years should weigh much in favour of a change of venue,” Ellies said. “It does not, in my view, rise to the level of sustained pre-trial publicity.”
Wright was arrested on Dec. 12, 2018 and has remained in custody since that day.
He has been denied bail twice since his arrest, one in March 2019 and then again in May this year. The details of the arguments being made by the Crown and defence cannot be released under a court-ordered publication ban.
Furthermore, the Crown attorney’s office applied for and succeeded in a direct indictment in 2019, meaning Wright would not have a preliminary hearing that had been scheduled for Nov. 19. A preliminary hearing is held to determine if there is sufficient evidence to proceed to trial.
When he was arrested, Greater Sudbury Police Chief Paul Pedersen said Sweeney’s death had never been treated as a cold case.
Since 1998, police received more than 2,000 tips and eliminated more than 1,500 people as suspects over the course of the investigation.
Police made numerous public appeals, released evidentiary photos, and employed innovative investigation techniques as information and technology advanced.
