TUESDAY UPDATE:

Lawyers questioned additional potential jurors Tuesday in a courtroom at the 19th Judicial District Courthouse in downtown Baton Rouge, eliminating some from the jury pool but not putting together a panel to hear the first degree murder trial of a  former used car dealer who’s accused of paying to have his ex-wife killed following their divorce in 2015.

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MONDAY'S STORY:

BATON ROUGE — Jury selection opened Monday in the first degree murder trial of a former used car dealer who’s accused of paying to have his ex-wife killed following their divorce in 2015.

Hamid Ghassemi, 72, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Taherah Ghassemi. She was kidnapped, shot in the head and found buried in a remote part of St. Helena Parish about a month after she went missing back in 2015.  

Judge Tarvald Smith refused Ghassemi's request to further postpone the trial, which has already been held up by a steady flow of complications, including the coronavirus pandemic and Ghassemi firing his own defense attorneys.

Dozens of potential jurors gathered in Judge Smith’s courtroom Monday afternoon, but the proceedings were delayed when no one responded as court officials called out various names. Names on a list from which they worked didn’t match the names of the people present.

“There was a mixup and I take full responsibility for that,” Smith said, without explaining what had happened. It seemed the jury notices had directed the potential panel to the right place - just the list of names was incorrect.

Once jury selection started, Smith and lawyers worked through standard questions of whether anyone knew any of the parties and whether anyone knew too much about the case. One man was dismissed after he said he knew Ghassemi’s son, and a woman was shown the door following a series of questions about media coverage and whether she could judge the case fairly. The reason for her dismissal wasn’t immediately clear.

Ghassemi is accused of paying three hitmen $10,000 to carry out the murder: Tyler Ashpaugh, Daniel Richter and Skyler Williams. Two of them, Ashpaugh and Richter, took plea deals in 2018. However, Richter withdrew his guilty plea in 2021, and Ashpaugh was found dead from an apparent overdose in his cell at Angola prison earlier this year.

In the past few months, Williams has taken his own plea deal, and Richter has flipped his plea back to guilty, a reversal that happened just last week according to Baton Rouge court records. 

While Ashpaugh's initial deal entailed testifying against Ghassemi, prosecutors would not say whether Richter and Williams would have to appear as witnesses.