Coverage of the financial misconduct allegations against the former director of the Bayou La Batre Housing Authority “does not come close to warranting” moving an upcoming trial out of Mobile, according to a judge.
An Aug. 31 ruling denied a request by Virginia Huddleston and Darryl Wilson to transfer their civil trial. In reaching his decision, Circuit Court Judge Wesley Pipes examined Mobile’s news media landscape — and, in particular, the former reach of the area’s largest daily newspaper, whose “hard to believe” print circulation figures have left an extremely high standard for when cases should be relocated because of their effect on a jury pool.
The Allegations
Huddleston and Wilson have been featured in the news cyclically since 2020 over allegations that they breached their fiduciary duties, conspired to convert and misappropriate Housing Authority assets, wasted corporate assets, and unjustly enriched themselves through salary, bonus and retirement payments approved during their tenure.
The couple argued that the continuing coverage — compounded by publicity surrounding a scathing order Pipes issued in July — had made a fair trial impossible in Mobile County.
Pipes flatly disagreed. He found the couple had failed to provide evidence the coverage had tainted public opinion, and pointed to Alabama case law that itself grew out of Mobile’s media environment.
The Benchmark: A Case With 59 Articles
Much of the analysis centered on Luong v. State, a Mobile County murder case that generated extraordinary coverage after Lam Luong was accused of throwing his four children from the Dauphin Island Bridge in 2008.
In that case, Pipes noted, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals identified 59 separate articles in that newspaper alone. Even so, the Alabama Supreme Court found that Mobile County’s large population reduced the likelihood of prejudice.
The circulation figures from that era are what give the benchmark its force. According to the decision, at the time of the Luong case the newspaper had a daily circulation of 219,000 readers — roughly 53% of the adults in the Mobile area — with Sunday circulation of 271,000 and what Pipes called “an astounding” average weekly circulation of 335,000, or roughly 81% of all adults in the Mobile area.
In other words: a case covered 59 times by a paper reaching four out of five adults in the market still did not justify moving the trial.
What the Couple Actually Submitted
By comparison, Pipes wrote, Huddleston and Wilson cited coverage from several local news outlets but attached only four articles, and provided no circulation data at all.
That omission is not a technicality. A change-of-venue motion based on pretrial publicity turns on saturation — what share of the potential jury pool has been exposed to the coverage, and whether that exposure created fixed opinions. Submitting articles without circulation or audience figures leaves the court no way to measure reach.
“Either way, the amount of media coverage for this civil matter is minuscule compared to the Luong trial,” Pipes wrote.
He also noted that Mobile County had roughly 414,000 residents in the 2020 census and remains one of Alabama’s largest counties — the population factor that the Alabama Supreme Court found significant in Luong.
The Standard Is Even Harder in a Civil Case
There is an additional asymmetry worth noting. Luong was a capital murder prosecution, where a defendant’s liberty and life were at stake and constitutional fair-trial protections apply with their full weight.
Huddleston and Wilson’s matter is a civil trial over money. If the extensive coverage in a capital case did not clear the bar for relocation, a civil dispute supported by four articles faces a considerably steeper climb.
The Alternative Request, Also Denied
The couple also asked, in the alternative, for an individual jury selection process — questioning prospective jurors one at a time rather than as a group.
Individual voir dire is used in cases where a court is concerned that a juror’s answer in front of the full panel could contaminate the others. Its cost is time: questioning a jury pool one person at a time can extend selection from hours into days.
Pipes rejected the request, and framed the rarity of the practice in terms of his own experience on the bench.
“The Court has now presided over at least one hundred jury trials and conducted voir dire in matters ranging from capital murder to misdemeanor appeals,” Pipes wrote. “In between there have been too many true high profile murder trials attendant with pretrial publicity, including several featured on the First 48 television series. Only one, a capital murder re-trial in a notorious and heinous arson death wherein the accused was a serving State Trooper, employed individual voir dire. The Court will not commit to doing so in this case.”
He added: “Voir dire will be employed in such a manner to ensure that a fair and impartial jury is selected to decide all remaining claims.”
A Media Landscape That Changed the Math
There is an irony embedded in the ruling worth drawing out.
The precedent that makes venue changes so difficult in Mobile County was built during an era when a single daily newspaper reached the overwhelming majority of adults in the market. That kind of concentrated reach no longer exists — audiences have fragmented across many outlets, and no single publication commands 81% of adults in any American metro.
But the legal standard did not fragment with it. A defendant today is measured against a benchmark set when saturation was possible, which means the practical threshold for proving that coverage has tainted a jury pool has become higher as the media environment has become more diffuse.
The trial will proceed in Mobile County on the remaining claims.