One week prior to the scheduled start of jury selection, attorneys for Grant James Spencer withdrew a motion for a change of venue and other motions that prosecutors hinted might delay Spencer’s trial on charges of felony murder and aggravated battery in the August 2014 death of Michael Joseph Gatto, 18.

“Right now, we’re headed in the direction of doing something Tuesday,” Ogeechee Circuit Chief Judge William E. Woodrum Jr. said at the conclusion of the Oct. 4 pretrial hearing.

He has jury selection scheduled to begin first thing on Oct. 11 for the trial in Bulloch County Superior Court.

Both were Georgia Southern University students when Gatto, a newly arrived freshman from Cumming, died after a confrontation with Spencer at the Rude Rudy’s nightclub in University Plaza, near campus, the night of Aug. 27-28, 2014. Spencer, then 20, worked as a bouncer at Rude Rudy’s, but is said in court documents to have been off-duty at the time.

Alcohol enforcement

Much of this past Tuesday’s hearing was taken up with contrasting statements regarding hundreds of pages of documents that Spencer’s defense attorneys, L. David Wolfe of Atlanta and Matthew Hube of Statesboro, obtained through a Georgia Open Records Act request to the city of Statesboro last month.

The documents have to do with the city’s handling of alcoholic beverage laws, including its own ordinance, and any investigations into lax enforcement.

Assistant District Attorney Daphne Totten told the judge she was emailed more than 1,800 pages the previous Tuesday while she was in court. She got them the next day, when they took most of the day to print out, she said.

Totten said she wasn’t at that point requesting a continuance, but was expressing concern about the state’s readiness for trial if prosecutors had to respond to this material. Totten argued that the documents concerning the city’s alcohol enforcement and revisions of its ordinance were not relevant.

“My position is I don’t know how the Alcohol Ordinance relates to the defense of Grant Spencer,” Totten told Woodrum. “Voluntary intoxication is not a legal defense for any criminal offense, including felony murder.”

Wolfe had filed a motion to compel discovery, dated Tuesday, demanding that the district attorney’s office respond with more information. But he withdrew the motion at the conclusion of the hearing.

While repeatedly saying that the defense would not use the documents from the open records request, Wolfe argued that they would be relevant.

“If the state doesn’t want us to go into what really happened … and wants the trial to go forward based just on what happened between Mr. Spencer and Mr. Gatto, then we’re prepared to do that,” Wolfe said at one point.

But the city documents, he said, would have explained how Gatto got into the club. The city of Statesboro, Wolfe asserted, allowed a culture to exist at Rude Rudy’s that encouraged customers under the legal drinking age of 21 to come in and drink.

While the city’s ordinance required places that served alcohol to get at least 50 percent of their revenue from food, the city allowed clubs to count Coca-Cola, other mixers and cover charges, including those paid by customers under 21, to count as nonfood items, he noted.

A city self-investigation in 2014 showed potentially thousands of violations were tolerated, and other documents would reveal that police were discouraged from enforcing the law, Wolfe said. Just this year, City Council adopted an entirely new Alcoholic Beverages Ordinance after discussing it off and on since before Gatto’s death.

Motions withdrawn

But Wolfe also said that, after Spencer has spent two years in jail without bond, they now put a priority on proceeding to trial.

“We’ll withdraw all the motions that we’ve filed, and we’re ready to go first thing Tuesday morning,” Wolfe said.

Besides the motion to compel discovery, and the Sept. 12 motion for a change of venue to another county on the basis of prior publicity, he withdrew two motions for special methods of jury selection.

Totten said she wanted the judge to consider a gag order prohibiting both prosecution and defense attorneys from discussing the case further with reporters, but Woodrum did not reply to that request during the hearing.

Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.