Jury selection has begun for the United States trial of an Auckland University graduate accused of murdering his wife in New York last year.
Blazej Kot, 25, entered Tompkins County Courthouse, near Ithaca in New York State yesterday wearing street clothes, as lawyers began picking a dozen jurors and four alternates from a panel of 150, WENY TV channel reported.
Kot is accused of stabbing his wife Caroline Coffey, 28, to death last June -- her body was found on a jogging trail in Taughannock Falls State Park -- and he is also accused of setting fire to their home.
Kot graduated from Auckland University in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in physics and computer science. He was born in Zaire, to Polish parents, and grew up in Auckland. He was attending Cornell University in New York State when he killed British-born American wife.
The trial on charges of second-degree murder, third-degree arson and tampering with physical evidence could last up to three weeks, and Kot's appointed attorney, Joseph Joch, is expected to try to prove "extreme emotional disturbance".
"We don't contest our client's guilt," Mr Joch said as he began questioning the potential jurors: "We don't say he's not guilty of a homicidal crime."
Mr Joch later added that Kot "did this horrible killing of this person who was closest to him in the world".
He stressed to potential jurors that they would be asked to look beyond the grisly aspects of the case, listen and learn about mental illness and return a verdict of either murder or manslaughter.
Prosecutors have said Kot stabbed Ms Coffey to death on the evening of June 2 and set fire to their apartment to cover up the crime.
Tompkins County Judge John Rowley ordered Mr Joch to provide all records and reports "related to defendant's claim of a psychiatric disorder", and ordered Kot to undergo a psychiatric examination, according to court papers.
Mr Joch asked potential jurors if they could consider mental illness a defence, if they had experience of mentally ill people with powerful delusions of non-existent events or people, knew any Alzheimer's patients, and if they had any firmly held beliefs about how mental illness manifests itself.
Saying they might hear testimony that Kot displayed no signs of mental illness, Mr Joch asked potential jurors if they could believe a person was mentally ill even if he or she displayed no symptoms.
"Nobody saw this coming," Mr Joch said at one point. "I've never seen where something erupted like a volcano, like it did here."
Ms Coffey did nothing to provoke her homicide, he said, adding that "she went for a jog with her husband and didn't come back".
