Strategic motions and judicial discretion: Change of venue motions in North Carolina capital punishment cases

Abstract

The severity of capital punishment requires heightened attention to seat a fair and impartial jury to protect the rights guaranteed in the Sixth Amendment. Despite the important role change of venue motions play in protecting jury impartiality, little empirical research has examined factors influencing their filing and granting. Using a dataset of North Carolina capital trials from 1977 to 2023, we estimate binary and multilevel logistic regressions to identify predictors of change of venue motions filing and granting, accounting for between-county variation. The results show that filings are significantly more likely in cases involving multiple victims, rape, White or law enforcement victims, or retrials, but less likely when victims were engaged in illegal activity. Smaller jurisdictions are also more likely to generate venue motion requests. Further, judicial decisions to grant venue motions are driven more by county-level and courtroom characteristics than by case-specific factors. These findings suggest that venue motion filings reflect strategic defense decisions influenced by anticipated juror bias, while granting decisions are more strongly influenced by local institutional context. These findings suggest that judges may be responding more to institutional pressures than to the case-specific factors motivating defense requests, raising equity concerns about the consistent application of this Sixth Amendment safeguard across jurisdictions in capital cases.