MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – Jury selection is due to begin next month in U.S. District Court in Burlington for Vermont’s first death penalty trial in almost half a century.

If federal prosecutors have their way, a Vermont jury will convict and then sentence to death Donald Fell for kidnapping Teresca King in Rutland and taking her to New York state where she was beaten to death as she pleaded for her life.

Vermont doesn’t have a death penalty but the federal government has jurisdiction in the case because King’s death involved crossing state lines.

Both defense attorneys and prosecutors are reluctant to discuss the specifics of the case so close to trial.

But Fell’s attorney, Alexander Bunin, an Albany, N.Y.-based public defender and a veteran of two state death penalty trials in Texas, said federal death trials are different.

“The first phase is very fact based, it’s the kind of trial that lawyers and people who watch cop shows are used to dealing with and understanding,” said Bunin.

“The big difference is there is a second trial on penalty where the issue before the jury is whether this particular human being deserves to die, has lost their moral entitlement to live,” said Bunin. “In terms of atmospherics and legalities, it’s a very different species of trial.”

Acting Vermont U.S. Attorney David Kirby said jury selection could take months. The trial itself could take six weeks to two months.

A death penalty expert said he felt Fell could be sentenced to death. “It’s pretty bewildering stuff because it’s such an anomaly here. It’s so un-Vermont,” said Michael Mello, a professor at the Vermont Law School.

“I think of Vermont as having a fairly liberal-progressive, political elite,” said Mello. “I am not sure that’s reflected in every day, ordinary Vermonters, the kind of folks who end up sitting on juries.”

Court records say Fell and Robert Lee, who were 20 and 21 at the time, were allegedly high on crack cocaine in November 2000 when they fatally stabbed Fell’s mother Debra Fell and her friend Charles Conway in a Rutland apartment.

Police said Fell and Lee then carjacked King, a 53-year-old Clarendon woman, in the parking lot of a downtown shopping plaza. Police said they drove to New York where King was beaten to death.

Fell and Lee were arrested three days later in Arkansas.

Fell and Lee were charged in federal court with carjacking and kidnapping with death resulting, which carries a possible death sentence. Lee hanged himself in prison in September 2001. Fell is being held without bail at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.

On May 3, attorneys will begin questioning a 1,000-member jury pool about their views on the death penalty. The number will be winnowed down to the 12-member jury with a yet-to-be determined number of alternates.

“Basically anyone who says their views are so strong that they wouldn’t be able to give both sides (of the death penalty issue) are excluded,” Mello said. “In practice, most of the folks who end up getting tossed are death penalty opponents.”

The Fell case has taken on a high profile among federal death penalty watchers across the country. In 2002 U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III, in a ruling as part of the Fell case, said the death penalty was unconstitutional. His opinion was subsequently overturned by the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York.

Vermont hasn’t executed a prisoner since 1954 and the state’s last capital trial was in 1957; the defendant in that case was convicted but not executed.

“There was every reason in the world not to seek the death penalty,” Mello said of the Fell case. “It’s an enormous expenditure of time and money, in the millions and the case will be tried by a judge who has already declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional in Vermont.”

Vermont had a potential capital case after the 1998 bombing in Fair Haven that killed Christopher Marquis. That case was settled in 1999 when the defendant, Chris William Dean, of Pierceton, Ind., then 37, pleaded guilty to a charge that he sent the bomb that killed Marquis to avenge a botched CB radio deal arranged over the Internet. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

At that time U.S. Attorney Charles Tetzlaff said the difficulty of getting a jury to agree to execute Dean played into his decision to make the deal.

Vermont federal prosecutors proposed a plea agreement with Fell that would have given him a life sentence. They were overruled by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, Mello said.

AP-ES-04-02-05 1348EST