It will be April 2016 before the trial for former Birmingham minister Richard Shahan gets underway, but a pretrial hearing was held Aug. 19. Shahan is accused of killing his wife, Karen Louise Shahan, in their home in Homewood in July 2013.
During the pretrial hearing Judge Laura Petro ruled on several motions that were filed Aug. 17 by Shahan’s attorneys. The motions requested information on the potential jurors’ criminal history, access to the crime scene, a list of State experts that may be called by the prosecution during the trial and access to any PowerPoint or similar visual presentation “to determine … if any unfairly prejudicial, inflammatory and/or otherwise inadmissible evidence or argument … would infringe on the defendant’s constitutional rights.”
Petro granted the motion on the visual presentations and set Nov. 6 as a deadline for the prosecution to provide a list of experts they plan to call at trial. She also approved the use of a jury questionnaire.
The defense is arguing that Shahan did not kill his wife but that someone broke into their home and killed her. Shahan was supposedly out of town visiting family in Tennessee at the time of his wife’s murder. Her body, stabbed multiple times with an unknown object, was found at 11:15 a.m. on July 23, 2013.
Shahan was arrested Jan. 1, 2014, in the Nashville airport as he was trying to board a plane for Germany for a reported three-year missions trip. The prosecution has obtained more than 3,000 emails from Shahan’s computer indicating he was planning to flee the country and start a new life with another man in Europe. He was carrying $27,000 in various currencies at the time of his arrest.
Plea entered
He has pleaded not guilty and has been under house arrest at his mother’s home in Homewood since January 2014 after his release on a $100,000 bond.
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